“Food is my great extravagance.”

—Andy Warhol

Wild Raspberries is a prime example of the social and whimsical aspects of Warhol’s 1950s book publishing practice. The cookbook is satirical, designed to parody the complex French cookbooks that were in vogue in the 1950s. In that spirit, although the images depict enticing cakes and platters, upon closer inspection, the recipes are for dishes like “Roast Iguana” and “Salade de Alf Landon,” the latter of which describes an ice cream cake adorned with lobster tails, asparagus tips, boiled eggs, and capers. For Warhol, the book was not about cooking, but rather an exercise in collaboration: with his friend Suzie Frankfurt who wrote the recipes, with his mother who provided her unique calligraphy, with the four young boys in Frankfurt’s apartment building who assisted in coloring his illustrations, and with the group of rabbis in downtown Manhattan who hand-bound the books once finished. 

Warhol and Frankfurt gave most of the copies of Wild Raspberries away to friends after only selling 20 books. This copy of Wild Raspberries was gifted by Warhol to Cipe Pineles, a pioneering designer and art director who served an illustrious 60-year career as the first female art director of magazines such as Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden. While making influential strides in a male-dominated field, Pineles also was one of the first art directors to commission fine artists to create illustrations for her magazines. As a result of this practice, Pineles gave Warhol some of his first commercial work as an illustrator; Warhol in turn gave Pineles copies of his books as a way of staying in touch and distinguishing himself in hopes of receiving additional commissions. 

Warhol’s decision to send Pineles Wild Raspberries carries particular significance as Pineles was known not only for her prominence as an art director, but also for her illustrations of food. In her graduation portfolio from Pratt Institute, her love of food appears in watercolors of bread loaves and chocolate cakes. Years later, she would incorporate similar culinary paintings in her professional work, notably in 1948 when she illustrated an article about potatoes for Seventeen magazine, which won her an Art Directors Club Award, and a 1945 manuscript for a cookbook of her own, which included illustrations of Eastern European Jewish food alongside hand-scripted recipes passed down from her mother. The whimsical imagery and playful lettering of the project, published posthumously in 2017 as Leave Me Alone with Recipes after her manuscript was discovered at an antiquarian book fair, exemplifies Pineles and Warhol’s shared stylistic sensibilities.