In 1983 Warhol joined the German-born pathologist Kurt Benirschke — reproductive biologist, former director of research at the San Diego Zoo, and a founder of its "Frozen Zoo" — to call attention to the preservation of wildlife. Together they chose sixteen endangered species; Warhol supplied the images and Benirschke the accompanying texts. The volume opens under two epigraphs set side by side: Chief Seattle's words of 1855, that whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man, and the biologist E. O. Wilson's 1980 warning that the loss of species diversity is a folly future generations will be least likely to forgive.

For the original works Warhol projected each animal onto paper and painted its outline in synthetic polymer with a small brush — a deliberate return to the "hand painting" of his Pop pictures of 1960–61. Writing in 2006, when the drawings were exhibited at Me.di.um in Saint-Barthélemy, Fergus McCaffrey read the series within Warhol's lifelong subject of untimely ends, extinction being one more variety of death, and concluded that the notionally disinterested painting machine cared, and cared deeply. Published the year before Warhol's death in February 1987, Vanishing Animals stands among the last books he made.

99 pp. With sixteen colour plates reproducing Warhol's original synthetic-polymer paintings of the chosen species, and further illustrations from photographs. Quarto (265 × 265 mm), black cloth decorated and lettered in white, pictorial dust jacket.

Near-fine volume in a very good jacket: the jacket worn, with small chips and creases to the edges and rubbing to the panels; the volume clean and sound.

PROVENANCE

Inscribed by Kurt Benirschke on the front free endpaper, dated 12/1/87.

REFERENCES

Fergus McCaffrey, "Andy Warhol – Vanishing Animals," exhibition catalogue, Me.di.um, Saint-Barthélemy, 2006. Cf. Warhol's Endangered Species screenprint portfolio, 1983