A new biography looks at how Andy Warhol changed art forever
Warhol in 1983 at his studio, the Factory, with paintings from his Endangered Species series
It’s also the place where the purely biographical insistently inserts itself, despite Warhol’s genuine abhorrence and Gopnik’s Warholian—that is, unserious—dismissal of it. The writer’s deep dive into the artist’s working-class upbringing in Pittsburgh, including the influence of his remarkable mother, explains so much about Warhol. Julia Warhola—Andy’s surname until he hacked the un-American vowel off the end—was a poor villager from what’s now Slovakia.
Warhol had also come of age when abstractionism reached its zenith as the dominant Western artistic style. “It absolutely ruled the roost,” notes Gopnik. “But at any moment like that, there are always people rebelling. So it’s also the moment where there’s a really strong push back to representation. And Warhol arrives at that hinge moment.