Blake Gopnik's Warhol offers a towering, tea-spilling biography of the pop icon: Review
It always seems to depend, more or less, on who’s asking. He could be The Man Who Wasn’t There, and also everywhere; a lightning rod, a walking Rorschach blot, an art star of both the highest and lowest order. All of those Andys exist — sometimes simultaneously over a single paragraph — in Blake Gopnik’s frank, gossipy, but not unacademic chronicle of one of the 20th century’s most foundational and confounding figures.
Seemingly no biographical detail is too big or too small for his 976-page colossus: Warhol’s eccentric diet ; his sex life ; the wigs and nose jobs and prolonged efforts to treat his problematic skin. The book begins with an incident that effectively divided Warhol’s life into before and after: the 1968 shooting by a disturbed scenester and sometime collaborator named Valerie Solanas that tore a ragged hole through his abdomen, nearly killing him. From there Gopnik dips back into the Pittsburgh childhood of the boy born Andrew Warhola; a backstory not unlike that of many working-class immigrants raised between the two World Wars, putting aside its early glimmers of artistic promise.
The outlines, at least, of what follows will be familiar to fans and even casual observers of the Warhol myth, as well-documented as it is: the rise of Pop Art; the silver-walled Factory that served as both business headquarters and a kind of counterculture Narnia; the motley crew of beauties, eccentrics, and hangers-on who became his Superstars. But the man who turned soup cans and silk-screened Elvises into high art is only one part of the portrait here.
Gopnik’s background as historian and critic can sometimes lead him down esoteric paths, and he tends to give his subject more credit for certain creative choices than might be due; the sheer volume of material, too, can be both exhaustive and exhausting.
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