ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to ask whether there was a creative artist at all behind Warhol’s commercial engagement with the art market. A positive answer emerges, concluding that Warhol’s output was transformed in the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Although formally supervised by the Union of Writers and the Young Communist League, the magazine increasingly ventured beyond what was acceptable during socialism and familiarized its readers with diverse and even previously forbidden authors and topics. In this world of artists, art connoisseurs and consumers, art critics, and gallerists, Abstract Expressionism had prevailed for some time as the principal development and taste, projecting what is known as the New York School into the Western avant-garde. The rectangular areas of the paintings, many of them enormous, were continually and unvaryingly filled with irregular color areas, brushstrokes and arcs of dripped paint.
