Warhol

Reviews / Votes

John Lennon and I once hid from Andy in a closet at the Sherry-Netherland 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 * 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 * 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 * 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 * 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 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 * Fabulously joyful... Gopnik seemingly had access to every doodle, soup tin and erotic snap, not to mention bus ticket and tax return, that the artist ever produced... Gopnik has such a strong sense of the design and patterns of his subject's life that the 976 pages seem if anything too few. For Gopnik, Warhol is the significant figure of the 20th century, surpassing even Picasso. It's a big claim, but the veteran critic makes a compelling case, arguing that Warhol collapsed and cleared the binaries - representation/abstraction, high/low and even art/not art - that every previous artist had been obliged to wrangle with. -- Kathryn Hughes * Guardian Books of the Year * Warhol was important and Gopnik is an assiduous and sometimes meditative historian of his strange life. Unlike the artist's taste for ready-made consumables, the book is the result of years scouring the 100,000 documents in the Warhol archive * The Times Best Books of the Year *