Warhol
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To this day, mention the name βAndy Warholβ to almost anyone and youβll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warholβs name and dominated the publicβs image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that.
Β In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. βThe meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was,β as Gopnik writes. βThatβs why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure,β from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the βperformanceβ of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardomβand his attempted assassination. Β
The extent and range of Warholβs success, and his deliberate attempts to thwart his biographers, means that it hasnβt been easy to put together an accurate or complete image of him. But in this biography, unprecedented in its scope and detail as well as in its access to Warholβs archives, Gopnik brings to life a figure who continues to fascinate because of his contradictionsβhe was known as sweet and caring to his loved ones but also a coldhearted manipulator; a deep-thinking avant-gardist but also a true lover of schlock and kitsch; a faithful churchgoer but also an eager sinner, skeptic, and cynic.
Wide-ranging and immersive, Warhol gives us the most robust and intricate picture to date of a man and an artist who consistently defied easy categorization and whose life and work continue to profoundly affect our culture and society today.
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Blake Gopnik, one of North Americaβs leading arts writers, has served as art and design critic at Newsweek, and as chief art critic at the Washington Post and Canadaβs Globe and Mail. In 2017, he was a Cullman Center Fellow in residence at the New York Public Library, and in 2015 he held a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University of New York. He has a PhD in art history from Oxford University and is a regular contributor to the New York Times.
