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Overview
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art" - Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol's ink drawings from the 1950s provide a compelling insight into the formative years of one of the twentieth century's most influential artists. Created during his early career as a commercial illustrator in New York, these works reveal the technical precision, wit, and observational sensitivity that would later underpin his celebrated Pop Art practice.
In this period, Warhol experimented with line, repetition, and subject matter, producing elegant and often whimsical compositions that demonstrate both discipline and creative curiosity. His delicate ink work balances economy of line with expressive detail, capturing figures, fashion, animals, and everyday objects with a distinctive sense of style and immediacy. Even at this early stage, Warhol's fascination with popular culture and the visual language of modern life is clearly evident, anticipating the themes that would later define his ground-breaking exploration of consumerism, celebrity, and mass production. These drawings stand not only as charming works in their own right, but also as important historical documents that illuminate the development of an artist who would go on to transform contemporary art.
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Works for sale
Andy Warhol American, 1928-1987
Study drawing for “Wild Raspberries” (Stuffed Morels), Circa 1956Ink & Graphite on Paper45.5 x 32.5 cms / 18 x 12¾ inchesDescription
Famed interior designer Suzanne Frankfurt sought out Warhol after she came across one of his pieces at Serendipity café in the late 1950s. They became fast friends and eventually decided to create a book together. The result was Wild Raspberries, a parody of the mass-produced books on French cuisine popular in the 1950s. The title is a nod to Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film Wild Strawberries.[1]
Created in 1959, the “cookbook” is comprised of illustrations accompanied by whimsical recipes such as “Omelet Greta Garbo,” Greengages a la Warhol,” and “Baked Hawaii.” The book was created with the help of many: Warhol drew, Frankfurt created the recipes, Warhol’s mother copied the verses, and the resulting books were “colored” by four schoolboys hired by Warhol and Frankfurt. (The coloring process reportedly was slow; only thirty-four of the approximately 100 books published had all their pages colored.) These contributions epitomize the “assembly line” method that so fascinated Warhol.
In her essay “Social Satire in the Guise of a Cookbook,” Susan Rossi-Wilcox describes the origins of the book:[2]
As [Frankfurt] recalled, “Andy and I would look at the recipes and not be able to figure them out…. We decided there should be a cookbook for people like us.” They concocted the project during his first dinner at the Frankfurts’ home. She assembled the text, which was copied by his mother Julia Warhola. Given the absurdity of the recipes’ instructions, the manuscript’s uneven letters, confused capitals, and misspellings exaggerate the overall effect.
As Frankfurt recollected in an interview in the 1990s, “we did the book, Andy with his Dr. Martin’s dyes and Mrs. Warhol [Andy’s mother], her calligraphy. She was gifted and untutored, and we left all the spelling mistakes. I wrote the recipes.”[3]
At the time of its publication, Warhol and Frankfurt gifted the books to friends as well as consigned a few copies to Doubleday Publishing and other entities. They also tried (unsuccessfully) to sell the book through Bloomingdales.[4]
The book was the subject of an exhibit – aptly titled “Wild Raspberries” – at the Bodley Gallery from December 1-24, 1959
[1] William Norwich, “Warhol Cookbook Co-Author Tells All,” The New York Observer, December 1, 1997, https://observer.com/1997/12/warhol-cookbook-coauthor-tells-all/.
[2] Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox, "Social Satire in the Guise of a Cookbook: Warhol’s Wild Raspberries," in Reading Andy Warhol (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 158.
[3] William Norwich, “Warhol Cookbook Co-Author Tells All,” The New York Observer, December 1, 1997, https://observer.com/1997/12/warhol-cookbook-coauthor-tells-all/.
[4] Lucy Mulroney, Andy Warhol: Publisher (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 13.
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