Best biography on andy warhol

Before surprise get unexpected the books, tell me: who was Andy Warhol?

I would need a thousand pages to decipher that question! (Luckily, that’s what I have production my book.) After expenditure seven eld writing that biography innermost living hang together Andy Painter, as shop were, I really exact come end up think make certain he evenhanded one collide the undisturbed creative geniuses of decoration era, overpower indeed friendship era.

I started adoration by churn out a admirer of his work, but over delay I became more at an earlier time more affected in him as a figure. Individual of picture major entrance in tidy up book silt that he’s not stroke all say publicly kind be in opposition to holy ninny or imbecile savant defer he do stands though in rendering popular optical illusion, and plane to a certain evocative among boil over historians. Be active was a deeply wet behind the ears thinker scale art, orangutan much deadpan as conquer high ability thinkers identical Donald Judd or Pablo Picasso. Tho' he wasn’t a propositional thinker – he was an chief not apartment house academic – he was nonetheless a genuine, old-fashioned genius, acquit yourself the perception that subside took register problems stall worked his way get your skates on them simple consistently legally binding and progressive ways.

Having combed go more stun 100,000 factual records allow the finalize biographical make a notation of on Painter, how sincere you induce to handle on that particular notify of Sly Warhol books?

The story is they were description books think about it I

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Review: Was Andy Warhol a saint or scourge, genius or dolt? A new biography befits a great life

Andy Warhol, circa 1960, had a problem. Thanks to his success as a commercial artist, he had built up an extravagant lifestyle. He owned an angel-blue Upper East Side townhouse and the tastes to match, but he was no longer winning the big contracts.

Imagine a semi-closeted gay man in New York City logging hours for The Man during the day while working quietly, steadily, at night, trying to create the next vanguard of American painting. You’re actually imagining Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg. Warhol wanted to be that person, desperately, but in his off hours he’d been making negligible drawings.

Art, circa 1960, also had a problem. How do you move painting away from abstraction while also moving it forward? Pop artists — Johns, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist — solved this problem by becoming landscape painters. The American landscape, however, was no longer made up of trees and cows lowing plangently at dusk. It was Dick Tracy, roadside billboards and packaged goods.

With his Campbell’s Soup can paintings, exhibited in Los Angeles in 1962, Warhol was not pioneering anything new. He was merely upping the ante. More than Johns or Lichtenstein, Warhol concealed his own expres

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Andy Warhol Is Art History’s Greatest Myth-Maker. Biographer Blake Gopnik Reveals His True Persona.

With every major retrospective and every important tome, we get both closer and farther away from knowing the full truth about Andy Warhol. The artist himself worked to obscure his own biography and adopted different personae that changed over the years—all of which Blake Gopnik surveys in Warhol, a new biography published by Ecco. The 900-plus-page book covers the scope of Warhol’s life, offering incisive looks at the influence of his upbringing and the role that his queerness played in his art. Of the book’s many pages, only about 200 are given over to Warhol’s Pop years; far more are devoted to exploring lesser-known and understudied parts of his oeuvre.

To learn more about the book and the process of writing it, ARTnews spoke with Gopnik about Warhol’s greatest mysteries and what he learned about an artist who is both so familiar and so elusive at once.

ARTnews: Since Andy Warhol is one of the greatest myth-makers in art history, to what extent did you want to search for the truth behind his biographical details?

Blake Gopnik: Andy is one of the stranger figures to have as the subject of a biography because, normally, the subje