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  • Published: 15 December 2003
  • ISBN: 9780679423720
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $110.00

Factory Made

Warhol and the Sixties




Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties is a fascinating look at the avant-garde group that came together—from 1964 to 1968—as Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, a cast that included Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Billy Name, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin, Ultra Violet, and Viva. Steven Watson follows their diverse lives from childhood through their Factory years. He shows how this ever-changing mix of artists and poets, musicians and filmmakers, drag queens, society figures, and fashion models, all interacted at the Factory to create more than 500 films, the Velvet Underground, paintings and sculpture, and thousands of photographs.

Between 1961 and 1964 Warhol produced his most iconic art: the Flower paintings, the Marilyns, the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, and the Brillo Boxes. But it was his films—Sleep, Kiss, Empire, The Chelsea Girls, and Vinyl—that constituted his most prolific output in the mid-1960s, and with this book Watson points up the important and little-known interaction of the Factory with the New York avant-garde film world. Watson sets his story in the context of the revolutionary milieu of 1960s New York: the opening of Paul Young’s Paraphernalia, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, Max’s Kansas City, and the Beautiful People Party at the Factory, among many other events.

Interspersed throughout are Watson’s trademark sociogram, more than 130 black-and-white photographs—some never before seen—and many sidebars of quotes and slang that help define the Warholian world. With Factory Made, Watson has focused on a moment that transformed the art and style of a generation.

  • Published: 15 December 2003
  • ISBN: 9780679423720
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $110.00

About the author

Steven Watson

Steven Watson is a cultural historian who is interested in
the group dynamics of the twentieth century American
avant-garde. In addition to his books for Pantheon, he is
the author of: Strange Bedfellows: The First American
Avant-Garde (Abbeville, 1991), Prepare for Saints:
Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson and the Mainstreaming of
American Modernism (Random House, 1999) and An Eye
on the Modern Century: The Selected Letters of Henry
McBride (co-editor, Yale University Press, 2001). Watson
has also organized two exhibitions at the National Portrait
Gallery: Group Portrait: The First American Avant-Garde,
and Rebels: Painters and Poets of the 1950s, published a
collaborative artists' portfolio. Artifacts at the End of a
Decade, and produced and directed Prepare for Saints, a
documentary film about the opera. Four Saints in Three
Acts, broadcast on Public Television.

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