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  • Published: 2 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141977744
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 976
  • RRP: $35.00

Warhol

A Life as Art




The definitive biography of one of the most famous and influential artists the world has ever seen

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.

  • Published: 2 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141977744
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 976
  • RRP: $35.00

Praise for Warhol

John Lennon and I once hid from Andy in a closet at the Waldorf Astoria 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

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

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

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

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

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