This vibrant mini-hardback explores the life and dress of Frida Kahlo and is filled with Mexican-influenced patterns, photographs of key people and illustrations of her wardrobe. Kahlo has inspired many with her fashion, art and life, and this beautiful book considers what made her so unique.
John Lennon and I once hid from Andy in a closet at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. I wish I'd known him better. This fantastic new biography makes me feel that I do. It really reveals the man - and the genius - under that silver wig.
—— Elton JohnSuperb...Gopnik persuasively assembles his case over the course of this mesmerising book, which is as much art history and philosophy as it is biography
—— Kathryn Hughes , GuardianA major biography based on hundreds of interviews, which considers the artist as a symbol of gay achievement and explodes the myth of his asexuality.
—— GuardianMonumental... rollicking... a formidable achievement
—— Mick Brown , The TelegraphGripping
—— The Daily MailFull of irresistible titbits...Gopnik leaves us little doubt of the significance of Warhol at his best: the links between serial production in his Pop paintings and minimal avant-garde music; the Death & Disaster series identifying tragedy as a new form of mass entertainment; voyeuristic films occluding the line between art and life; portraits that presented America's elite like a range of luxury goods. To borrow a favourite Warholism: Wow.
—— Hettie Judah , i newspaperGopnik's exhaustive but stylishly written and entertaining account is Warholian in the best sense-raptly engaged, colorful, open-minded, and slyly ironic. ("He had become his own Duchampian urinal, worth looking at only because the artist in him had said he was.") Warhol fans and pop art enthusiasts alike will find this an endlessly engrossing portrait
—— Publisher's WeeklyServes up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol's life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist's influences and techniques...a fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
—— Kirkus ReviewsBlake Gopnik's incisive, richly detailed bio puts you in Andy's inner circle and sanctum from beginning to end. It breaks down how, for decades, Andy strategically defined the pop culture zeitgeist as the world's most renowned artist
—— Fab 5 Freddy, graffiti and hip-hop pioneerAn excellent inside view of Andy's life, personality, and genius.
—— Diane von FurstenbergArt and art history jumped the tracks with Andy Warhol. Blake Gopnik's lucid account of the artist and the wild times puts all that back on track again. An eye-opening biography that reads like a potboiler
—— Jerry Saltz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for CriticismIt's a work of biography, analysis, reverence, and supplication, and it's filled with buoyant representations of both Paul's and John's work. A charge runs through it, the crackly static electricity of two connected souls touching hands across a century.
—— Hillary Kelly , VulturePaul's prose is spare and luminous, revealing her painter's eye in attention to colour, texture, and depth... The included paintings, both John's and Paul's, are breathtaking. Fellow artists will relish this lucid look at what is required to "live and paint truthfully."
—— Publishers WeeklyRemarkable dialectics of loneliness and desire, of love and manipulation, that Paul handles with patient - even disarming - frankness... Alongside the imaginative biography of John, and alongside the dated journal entries, the book is also a foray into Paul's past. The effect is one of a dreamscape, a mesh of past and present, as the borders between the two female artists soften and start to give.
—— Victoria Baena , BafflerCelia Paul, in both her painting and her writing, is a formidable guardian of her own inner life, as well as a careful chronicler of what it means to traverse a boundary that is barely perceptible, hardly there at all, and yet is the place where truth emerges, hangs in the balance, is not quite distinguishable from a lie. Letters to Gwen John...is a profound act of truth-telling made possible by the thrilling risk of tarrying at that contested border. Paul's writing is a kind of ritual, as well as a pilgrimage, in which she leads us into those hidden places where understanding is beside the point, and invites us simply to dwell with her and whomever else she summons.
—— Artforum , Jack HansonA loving and inquiring text, a lyrical correspondence between two women filtered through the inner life of one. It is also an intimate cataloguing of how loneliness and desire transmute to artistic awakening.
—— Makenna Goodman , AstraA compelling and thoroughly absorbing amalgam of history, autobiography, travelogue and philosophical ruminations on the nature of creativity and many other things besides
—— Monica Bohm-Duchen , Jewish ChronicleDe Waal…sees the world in a shard of white porcelain, thoughtfully and poetically tracing its invention and material production from imperial China through medieval Europe, and Cherokee creeks to the satanic factories of Nazi Germany. Global cultural history, structural and individual: this should be a humanising core text on the now sadly abandoned liberal arts curriculum.
—— Professor E. Stina Lyon , Times Higher EducationAn intimate and lyrical writer with a sophisticated grasp of cultural history… De Waal’s prose thrives on exchanges of curiousity… The White Road feels like a long book, and a long book may sometimes have qualities peculiar to its size. It may be by turns capricious, slow-drifting, and affected. It may yet enlarge your world.
—— Julian Bell , New York Review of BooksA stylishly written account with a surprisingly spiritual dimension. Engrossing.
—— Rebecca Wallersteiner , LadyDe Waal’s charm lies in his ability to undertake obsessive research, to pile up and accrue, to involve the reader in almost frantic travelling, note-taking and reading. There’s no doubting that The White Road is a mighty achievement.
—— Kathleen Jamie , GuardianHis enthusiasm is infectious... This is not just about one ancient industry – somehow, superbly, it's about industry itself
—— William Leith , Evening StandardCombining what is clearly a life-long love of art with an admirable depth of knowledge, Barnes brings a novelist’s eye to the gallery wall and, with this, a fresh, accessible approach to the stories being told in each painting.
—— Lucy Scholes , IndependentThought-provoking, beautifully presented, tender.
—— Rachel Joyce , ObserverBarnes has a wonderful eye for what makes a good picture, and a command of language that again and again allows readers to share what he sees.
—— Andrew Scull , Times Literary SupplementWell-informed and deeply admiring, but never didactic.
—— Prue Leith , Woman and Home[It] gave me a new confidence in how to engage with, understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.
—— Mariella Frostrup , ObserverFor those…insecure when viewing art, not always sure how to decode it or emotionally engage with it, this offers a lifeline…Utterly compelling.
—— Mail on Sunday , Mariella FrostrupA typically elegant ad absorbing book by one of t great contemporary English Writers, and with strong Gallic undertones – a wonderful set of essays about artists, many of them French, covering the period from Romanticism through to modernism.
—— Terry Lempiere , GuardianOpinionated, enthusiastic, witty and beautifully written.
—— Charlotte Heathcote , Sunday ExpressJulian Barnes is best known for his fiction...but he's also an excellent art writer... Peppered with personal insights and select historical detail, each piece is as engaging as the next
—— Millie Watson , Citizen FemmeUnusually moving.
—— William Leith , Evening Standard