Warhol by Blake Gopnik
Review of Warhol by Blake Gopnik
Warhol by Blake Gopnik (2020). Published by Ecco.
For the past year, I have been on such an Andy Warhol kick. Like I have always known about him and his legacy, because was a titan of the art world in the 1960s and 1970s.
What really got my gears grinding towards Warhol and his entire legacy was the fact the Brooklyn Museum had an exhibit with some of his earlier works, which was
Lo and behold, the most recent time I went to my library, I ended up wandering into the new biography section and stumbled upon the multicolored spine of Warhol. I knew this book existed because on one of my scouting trips to Barnes & Nobles, I randomly came across this biography in the art section amongst the books about fashion designers.
I picked this book up, which is the size of a small dictionary, but isn’t as big as my copy of the newest biography of Sylvia Plath.
Here’s my review!
Warhol goes into painstaking detail about Andy Warhola’s humble origins into the art world.
I mentioned in the introduction that this book is the size of a dictionary, and that comes in with good reason. Blake Gopnik, who is an art critic—I think I remember he used to be with the Washington Post—spent seven years planning out this book and all the research and writing that would need to go into it, and trust me, it shows. Andy Warhol, as you’ll come to realize as you read through this monster, liked to invent legends about himself.
Whether it’s lying about his age or how he got the inspirations for the soup cans (at first he used to say it was his mother, but she was a classic immigrant who wouldn’t dare to buy an expensive Campbell soup—she’d just make her own soups), you truly cannot trust Andy’s word as fact without doing some research. And that’s where Gopnik’s research comes in—he uses multiple sources to explain why a single thing isn’t true, which can be exhausting at times, but it drives home the point that Andy Warhol essentially was creating his own act.
Like many biographies, this one starts when Warhol is a young boy and his last name is simply Warhola.
We follow him from his early years as a young lad in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which wasn’t so glamorous and an immigrant neighborhood back then. His father died when he was only a young boy, forcing his mother to provide for their household. The only reason Andy was able to go to college was because he scraped together the money for it, and even then he was considered a terrible student.
Then Andy moves to New York City upon graduating, which is a ripe time for artists to be interacting with each other. I found this book to be interesting because it dives into how interconnected the art world in New York City was at the time, and how Warhol was taking inspiration from other active artists like Pollock.
Coming fresh off of my read of Ruth Asawa’s biography, there are some names mixing with where she graduated from (Black Mountain), as well as other newcomers at the time, such as Yayoi Kusama, entering the scene the same time as Warhol.
It also really helps bring together how small the NYC art scene truly is. Warhol got his start as a commercial painter going up to the offices of Harper’s Bazaar and presenting his portfolio and sales pitch to Diana Vreeland, one of the most legendary editors of Vogue Magazine and the head of fashion at the time.
Then there’s other people like Richard Avedon scattered throughout, citing how small this world truly is. I imagine that’s fascinating for people who have never experienced it in the flesh—I’ve only gotten a fraction of it through my experiences attending a school in New York.
The other big thing I liked about this biography, as someone who has never really read up on the lore behind Andy Warhol or the times he lived through, was the fact that it deeply contextualizes a lot of his artwork.
That will be one of the main takeaways for someone like me, who aspires to become an art historian, and is more valuable than some of the more mundane details.
You need to understand who Andy Warhol was as a person to completely comprehend why he is so popular. The other big thing is that Andy Warhol copied and pasted ideas from his predecessors and hit a Eureka moment, which is how he managed to get where he was as well.
Andy was very much a businessman and knew what it took to gain the attention. The critics hated him, but still he never gave up and so that gave him an avenue to keep exploring and going against the grain. Places like the MoMA and other prestigious art galleries never believed what this Czechoslovakian kid could do, but he was to become a tour de force in the industry.
Overall Thoughts
This is for the people deeply interested in art history and Andy Warhol specifically. It was very dense and difficult to get through at times, which is why I had to keep renewing my loan for it at the library and slowly hack away at the book fifty pages at a time.
It’s one of those books where you have to be an academic or simply passionate about the subject to get through. Some of the book’s most entertaining moments for me were when his mother, Julia Warhola, was described. Classic little immigrant woman hunting down the most local church, as well as telling all the female guests that they’d be a perfect match for Andy.
Meanwhile, her son is openly flashing his sexuality, something that was only just beginning to gain traction in that era. You really come to understand Warhol in this book, all his deep flaws included.
