Customer Reviews

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol

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With Pop Art entering its dotage, here come the book that delivers its fascinating youth and adolescence. Authors Scherman and Dalton, who clearly have earned themselves a Pulitzer if there is any justice in this world, form a genius tag team. Dalton, the insider, the eye witness, delivers the juicy gossip. Scherman, the talented journalist, delivers one of the great portraits of the American art world. The book focuses on the 1960s, the decade when the Pop artists of New York City completed the work of the Abstract Expressionists in the previous decade and knocked Europe off its pedestal to claim the center of the art universe.

Of course, at its center is the Dada of it all, Mr. Andy Warhola. We get a brief background of Andy's sickly childhood in Pittsburgh, where he escaped from a world of crowded immigrant flats and skin ailments by immersing himself in his mother's Hollywood fanzines. We follow him in his late teens to Carnegie Tech where he is both thought a fraud and a genius. There Andy discovers his penchant for shock with paintings that explore nose-picking and cross-dressing.

After graduation, Andy moves to New York and his fierce climb to the top begins. Warhol's ambition is shameless. He courts critics, dealers, Jasper Johns and anyone else that can move his career forward in the slightest. But he has the talent to match. His early work has him painting blow-ups of comic strips at least a year before the emergence of Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol, in the eyes of the authors, succeeds not because he hitches his wagon to the Pop tidal wave as much as he is the historical and personal embodiment of its ethos. The real achievement of this book, however, is that by the end the high priest of camp emerges as a hero as worthy as anything the Greeks had in their art.

This book is fabulous. It's the first book that really answered for me the question "What is Pop Art?" I had often inquired of others and researched Pop Art, but was often confused, until reading this book. The detail and evolution of Andy Warhol's life and art is vividly depicted. He's a fascinating character -- an extremely ambitious, hard-working man, masked beneath a nonchalant and detached outward persona.

Andy often contradicted himself: describing Pop Art as only depicting "the boringness of life" and elsewhere declaring Pop Art "as portraying the beauty of the ordinary". But Warhol's genius emerged early on when he was merely illustrating shoe ads for I. Miller Shoes. His unusual flair was apparent and some artists actually collected these images to study.

If you appreciate Pop Art and the era, and Andy Warhol -- get this book. Kudos to the authors -- you did a great job!

"If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act."

The authors write, "When she left the Chelsea, Solanas had asked Mrs. Wilson if she could keep her laundry at her apartment. `She showed up with a bulky-looking flowered cloth bag and put it under the bed. One morning Valerie arrived at my mother's door, 208 West 23rd Street,' said Wilson, `saying she had come for her laundry'" (Page 421). No one ever said "bulky-looking," that is an editor making an event explicit but truly false. This passage sounds like a rewrite by someone who uses another journalist's notes, without getting confirmation from people who were interviewed. The point of the anecdote has been blunted by not understanding the deception about a gun. Valerie Solanas often visited May Wilson, and as often asked to 'borrow' $5 or $10. She asked to keep her laundry under the bed, but she arrived with non-bulky flower-print cloth bag which she said was her laundry, and shoved it under the bed. The bag contained no laundry, but one pistol. To get laughs, May Wilson would pull the bag out, then press the cloth to outline the gun - in a studio-apartment where children often played (see "twin baby daughters," page 134). She would say, "This is Valerie's laundry!" Thus a "feminist," Valerie, deceived a friendly older woman who even fed her. On June 3,1968, Valerie retrieved her gun. While exploitation of a generous woman is added to attempted murders, add "exploitation" to this book. If a book is untrustworthy on one page, then...

This is a very informative and well-researched book with a lot of interesting and verified takes on a very complex Guy we will never really know.