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Warhol
Oct 6, 2024 12:20 PM

Author:Blake Gopnik

Warhol

"Superb...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, The Guardian

When critics attacked Andy Warhol's Marilyn paintings as shallow, the Pop artist was happy to present himself as shallower still: He claimed that he silkscreened to avoid the hard work of painting, although he was actually a meticulous workaholic; in interviews he presented himself as a silly naïf when in private he was the canniest of sophisticates. Blake Gopnik's definitive biography digs deep into the contradictions and radical genius that led Andy Warhol to revolutionise our cultural world.

Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol's surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist's path from his origins as the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants in 1930s Pittsburgh, through his early success as a commercial illustrator and his groundbreaking pivot into fine art, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity of the '70s and '80s, as he reflected and responded to the changing dynamics of commerce and culture.

Warhol sought out all the most glamorous figures of his times - Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, the Barons de Rothschild - despite being burdened with an almost crippling shyness. Behind the public glitter of the artist's Factory, with its superstars, drag queens and socialites, there was a man who lived with his mother for much of his life and guarded the privacy of his home. He overcame the vicious homophobia of his youth to become a symbol of gay achievement, while always seeking the pleasures of traditional romance and coupledom. (Warhol explodes the myth of his asexuality.)

Filled with new insights into the artist's work and personality, Warhol asks: Was he a joke or a genius, a radical or a social climber? As Warhol himself would have answered: Yes.

Reviews

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 John

Superb...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 , Guardian

A major biography based on hundreds of interviews, which considers the artist as a symbol of gay achievement and explodes the myth of his asexuality.

—— Guardian

Monumental... rollicking... a formidable achievement

—— Mick Brown , The Telegraph

Gripping

—— The Daily Mail

Full 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 newspaper

Gopnik'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 Weekly

Serves 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 Reviews

Blake 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 pioneer

An excellent inside view of Andy's life, personality, and genius.

—— Diane von Furstenberg

Art 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 Criticism

It'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 , Vulture

Paul'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 Weekly

Remarkable 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 , Baffler

Celia 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 Hanson

A 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 , Astra

De Waal's elegant prose, rapt eye for aesthetics, subtle character sketches, and nuanced musings on Jewish identity yield a rich, Proustian recreation of a lost era

—— Publishers Weekly

de Waal's history, gives Letters to Camondo an undeniable emotional intensity

—— Brendan King , Times Literary Supplement

de Waal is a writer of grace and restlessly enquiring intelligence, and Letters to Camondo succeeds admirably... Edmund de Waal's beautiful book opens a window onto an entire lost world

—— Ian Thomson , Evening Standard

A rich and gorgeous meditation on art and grief... Beautifully written, elegantly odd and wonderfully immersive, this is a book like no other

—— Daunt Books

De Waal's sentences like to take the historical weight of the objects he describes, in prose that often puts you in mind of Bruce Chatwin, that other aesthete magically in thrall to painfully buried European history. He builds a picture of Camondo accumulating belongings in an extravagant effort at belonging... [an] unforgettable book

—— Tim Adams , Observer

De Waal's gentle and thoughtful probing is persuasive and his exploration of the family history after the count's death in 1935 - especially the deaths of family members under the Nazis - is both poignant and unforced

—— Michael Prodger , New Statesman

The form of a series of letters to Camondo... [is] an inspired idea, for it allows de Waal to achieve an intimacy of tone and directness of expression... a powerful address that is both a rupture with and a binding to all that precedes it

—— Laurel Berger , Spectator

A fascinating portrait of the French collector Count Moise de Camondo

—— A Little Bird, *Summer Reads of 2021*

Outsider art requires outsider biography, and Blackburn, an expert in finding new forms to fit odd lives, has managed her task magnificently.

—— Kathryn Hughes , Guardian

Beautifully delicate.

—— Big Issue

Richly satisfying.

—— Charlotte Heathcote , Sunday Express

A gorgeous, dreamy quest, for a man named John Craske.

—— Rose George , New Statesman

The book has an understated charm and is a beautifully rendered portrait of an artist’s life and landscape.

—— Ian Critchley , Sunday Times

This tender biography is gossipy and philosophical by turns.

—— Daily Telegraph

Executed with undeniable skill and the sense of an intimate acquaintance with life on the open seas.

—— Herald Scotland

Unusually moving.

—— William Leith , Evening Standard
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