The Andy Warhol Diaries

New York: Warner Books, 1989. 4to.; illustrated in black and white; illustrated endpapers; binding loose; black cloth blindstamped and stamped in silver; illustrated dust-jacket with light wear at head of spine; tail altered with magic marker and silver paint.

$17,500

First edition, second printing of Andy Warhol’s Diaries. This copy and been doctored and embellished with a self-portrait, drawn on the front endpaper, by the notorious German artist, Martin Kippenberger. The portrait is a reprise of Warhol’s famous self-portrait, executed in 1967, and used for the design of the dust-jacket and endpapers for the book. Kippenberger has altered the famous portrait by casting himself as Warhol, mimicking the pose and replacing Warhol’s visage with his own. It’s a revealing gambit by Kippenberger. He is at once typically hubristic, by identifying himself with Warhol, the master of post war art, and at the same time self-effacing, by making a drawing only a few inches high and hiding it within the covers of a book.

Kippenberger’s identification with Warhol has been examined at length by critics, though this seems to be the only example where the connection is drawn so clearly by the artist himself. Kippenberger has been called a “child” of Warhol by numerous critics (some meant this as praise, others as condemnation). Kippenberger, though, was not ambivalent in his admiration. He saw Warhol as both a father figure and as a challenge. He looked to Warhol as a model for constructing an artistic persona and he drew inspiration from the many ways that Warhol embellished his own image, whether he was working for a modeling agency or lending his aura to advertisers. In fact, Kippenberger seems to have internalized the Warholian lesson that, for an artist, constructing one’s own image is as much an act of art as is conventional painting, sculpting or drawing.

Like Warhol, Kippenberger viewed his personal aura as a singular artistic achievement; it was the thing that lent piquancy to all his other paintings, performances and conceptual pieces. More than that, it had its own plastic qualities, feeding his other artworks and contextualizing their presence in galleries and museums. Kippenberger, like Warhol, refused to draw a clear line between artistic and commercial activities. The image he has drawn in this book, a self-portrait that apes Warhol’s own, dramatizes the feeling of discipleship Kippenberger felt toward the older artist. At the same time the drawing was another act in Kippenberger’s ongoing construction of his artistic persona, a provocative conflation of his own developing reputation with that of an acknowledged master--a typically naked act of self-exposure by a legendarily self-promoting artist.