Author: Patricia Geis
Translation Rights: Combel Editorial
If you want to extend a child’s imaginative world beyond Spot the Dog or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, then this introduction to Andy Warhol for the very young is a must. Patricia Geis assembles the most child-friendly detail from the life of Andy with amusing pop-ups and images from his work to ensure a young child will get hooked and love to touch and feel his soup-cans, silver clouds and then construct their own time capsules and make their own serigraphs.
The windows on the opening pages spelling out his first steps are likely to appeal to an infant love of the quirky and a parental desire to encourage trying new things and not being afraid of making mistakes. Warhola becomes Warhol as the result of an editor’s error and it sticks for life. His mother wrote the texts for his drawings of cats, shoes, butterflies… and didn’t have a perfect knowledge of English, spelling mistakes crept in there too. In their house there were cats galore, offspring of Hester and Sam and all named Sam.
Patricia Geis chooses the images and writes the text in such a way that a young child engages with Andy Warhol: there is humour, insight, and provocation. Naturally any child can have a go at doing a Warhol because many a child will already be making art from yogurt pots and tin labels at home and at school.
This book, part of a series, is sturdy, well produced and a pleasure to handle and could be enjoyed by children throughout the world who may never have heard of Pop Art or AW. It would surely have a large market in the English-speaking world where his work is already used extensively in schools and on the web to arouse children’s interest in looking at modern art and creating their own work.
This is a summary of the reader’s report by Peter Bush