Warhol

Review by Booklist Review

The most impressive thing about this new Warhol biography is not its length--more than 900 pages--but the fact that art is discussed on nearly every one of them. Through close attention to Warhol's radical silkscreens, films, and writing, as well as the goings-on at his infamous Factory, prominent art critic Gopnik details how the iconic artist sculpted "his persona into a work of user-friendly Pop Art." With each chapter corresponding to roughly a year in the artist's life (though the first 17 are greatly condensed), he's able to slowly disclose the patchwork of Warhol's diverse influences and art-world references. Gopnik links, for instance, Warhol's film Kiss to a 1910s short film of the same name, and the seemingly junk-filled boxes Warhol dubbed Time Capsules to a period work by the German artist Gerhard Richter. Throughout, readers encounters artists like Stuart Davis and Sister Mary Corita, critics like Gregory Battcock and Ray Johnson, spaces like Ferus Gallery and the La MaMa theater. Gopnik's in-depth portrait is for the Warhol-initiated, who will gain new appreciation for the artist as the ultimate aesthetic "sponge."

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Art, commerce, homosexual camp, and the 1960s counterculture were all blithely blenderized by one man's genius, according to this sweeping biography of pop art master Andy Warhol. Art critic and New York Times contributor Gopnik dives deep into Warhol's oeuvre, from the famous pieces that mirrored mass-produced imagery--paintings of Campbell Soup cans and Brillo boxes, screen prints of celebrities including Marilyn Monroe--and his semiprurient, militantly unwatchable avant-garde films (Sleep comprised five hours of footage of a naked man sleeping) to his late urine-on-canvas phase. But Warhol's greatest image was himself, and Gopnik's fascinating narrative does full justice to the silver-wigged, pixie-ish, satirically vapid provocateur ("verybody's plastic--but I love plastic," he pronounced during a Hollywood sojourn) and to the maelstrom of drugs, partying, and crazed excess at the Factory, his New York studio-cum-asylum for artsy eccentrics. One of them, Valerie Solanas, founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men, shot and gravely wounded Warhol--and then asked him to pay her legal bills. 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. Photos. (Apr.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Named a resident biography fellow at CUNY's Leon Levy Center for Biography and recipient of a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, leading art critic Gopnik uses broad access to Warhol's archives to explore the artist's immigrant background, working-class upbringing, experience with commercial art, and more. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

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