Some of Andy Warhol's rarely seen early works go on show in Italy this weekend as part of a sweeping retrospective dedicated to the father of Pop Art in a small town near Parma.
Around 140 works tracing Warhol's career from the mid 1950s to the 1980s will be on display at the Magnani Rocca Foundation, a countryside villa that once belonged to the late Italian art collector and writer Luigi Magnani in Mamiano di Traversetolo.
Among Warhol's lesser known early works on show are the In the Bottom of My Garden series (1955), peopled with cartoon-like figures of plump pink cherubs inspired by children's books, and A Gold Book (1957), with lithographs on golden paper.
Also on display is a copy of Wild Raspberries (1959), a limited edition spoof haute cuisine cookery book aimed at members of New York high society who were clueless in the kitchen.
Illustrated by Warhol and handwritten by Warhol's mother Julia, its fanciful recipes were invented by his friend Suzy Frankfurt to parody the fussy French cookbooks that were all the rage that year.
Warhol hired schoolboys to colour in his drawings for the recipes, which include an eggless Omelet Greta Garbo, to be eaten alone in a candlelit room, and Piglet a la Trader Vic's, which comes with instructions to send the chauffeur to New York's Plaza Hotel to pick up a suckling pig.
Next on show are Warhol's more famous Pop Art works celebrating 1960s America consumer society, including his iconic Marliyn Monroe and Campbell's Soup cans, which he mass-produced as silkscreen prints in a bid to demystify art.
''An artist can slice a salami too,'' Warhol said.
''Why do people always think that artists are special? It's just another job.''
After Warhol was shot and almost killed by Valerie Solanas at his Factory studio in 1968, two relatively quieter decades of artistic production followed.
On display here is Mao (1973), a 15-foot silkscreen portrait of the Chinese Communist leader, and a series dedicated to transvestites entitled Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), where drag queens parodying the Hollywood icons Warhol had focused on in the 1960s were given the same star treatment by the artist.
The last decade of Warhol's life is represented by Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980), and his western series Cowboys and Indians (1986), depicting all-American heroes such as John Wayne alongside stereotyped images of Native American Indians.
Closing the show is The Last Supper (1987), presented in Milan during the last weeks of Warhol's life and inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece.
Warhol died in New York in 1987 following a routine gall bladder operation.
Andy Warhol - The New Factory runs at the Magnani Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo from March 15 to July 6.
