Customer Reviews

Warhol: The Biography

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Victor Bockris' biography is sympathetic to Warhol's supposed contrived personality. The reader gets the impression that the author, who had a personal association with Warhol, really understood the facination his subject maintained for his adopted country (the U.S.) throughout most of his working life. While others tend to dismiss Warhol as a simple poseur Bockris relates his wide-eyed enthusiasm for the consumer society. While some have suggested he was manipulative, this biography suggests that he was slightly naive. Most of his life is covered here and, although there is documented proof of some interesting associations that are not touched upon, in general the work is broad in its scope and the reader will discover that the most notorious pop artist of all had far greater depth than his blank features and fickle comments suggested. It is also a feast for those interested in good gossip and the social history of the 60s and 70s.

As a huge fan of this fascinating man who blured the line between art and commerce, I was looking for a well written book
thicker than a brick that would reveal once and for all the mystery that is Andy Warhol. Im still looking, the definitive Warhol bio is yet to be written it seems, but in the meantime I'll settle for this Bockris book which is a sound overall portrait of the artist and his life. Starting from his poverty and illness stricken childhood in an industrial town in Pennsylvania the author breezily tours the reader through his
college life, and his subsequent move to New York to become a highly successful (and paid) graphic artist, before establishing himself as one of the founding pioneers of pop art. From there we take rollercoaster ride through his film making years at the Factory, his subsequent shooting, and the time he spent as a socialite and portait artist in the last two decades of his life. Some light is shed on the issues concerning Andy's sexuality, Catholicism, monophobia, work ethic, short lived
intimate relationships, shopoholism, and his seemingly aloof public persona.

Though Bockris rightly bestows more pages to Warhols peak years as an artist in the sixties, he skims the later decades of his life. As with his Lou Reed biography, Bockris has a tendency to demonize his subjects towards the final chapters of his works. Try as his he might here, his weakly supported insinuations of Warhol as a cold and manipulative character are more a reflection on the authors own
feelings of insecurity, rather than their being any intrinsic truth in the matter. There is a middle way between sycophantism and character debasement, and Bockris obviously hasn't found it. It's adequately written, albeit unimaginatively, and it takes real effort on part of the reader to stop turning the pages. As it stands, a fine Warhol primer, but for those with an inquiring mind, this book will probably raise more questions than it answers.

The first half of this book is invaluable for the intimate infomation that it gives on Andy Warhol's early years. It is very sensitively written and thoroughly engaging, though the latter years are sort of run through at the speed of sound. That would be the only criticsm I have of this book but you can flesh out the facts (from Andy's view) by getting a copy of the Andy Warhol Diaries. Otherwise it's a really great book.

Now out in a new edition, Victor Bockris' WARHOL is a very solidly written and researched biography. In particular, the first half creates an extremely detailed portrait of Warhol's Pittsburgh youth; this adds a tremendous amount of context and depth to Warhol's own work, and the meanings and symbolisms of that work will gain new clarity after reading through some of Bockris' book.

Unfortunately, the book gets less detailed and more gossipy later on - Warhol's many flaws are underlined again and again, but Warhol surrounded himself with other highly creative people who launched interesting careers of their own - Paul Morrissey and Lou Reed both spring to mind - and Bockris does little or no investigation of Warhol's influence upon them, and any actual ideas just seem to get lost here amid the varied bits of gossip.

-David Alston

This biography is extremely interesting at times. I had never read a Warhol biography before I read this, and it provided a lot of great details, especially involving his early life.
The problem, though, is that it seems that sex seems to permeate everything. Perhaps Warhol was a man obsessed with it, as the author seems to suggest, but does that really call for the explicit details of his sexual activities to be included? Seriously....does it? I think not. After a particularly detailed description, I found myself thinking, "Ok, I get it, the man had a foot fetish. Can't we just leave it at that?" I must add that I am no Puritan by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something quite unsettling about Warhol to begin with (at least for me), and when you add sexual detail to it, it just gets....icky. If you don't have a problem with this, though (I'm sure some people might even especially want to read it with these details included), go for it. It is highly informative, and Warhol was nothing if not compelling.

This is not a brilliant biography, but there are interesting facts about Andy's life, and so I do recommend it. Ironically, in Andy Warhol's DIARIES, he mentions how a magazine is considering hiring Victor Bockris as one of its writers. And Andy says, "So they are really scraping the barrel." Ironic that Bockris, then, would be Andy's biographer! Bockris, though, isn't as bad a writer as Andy thought.

Bockris was a friend of Warhol, at least for several years. He shares a lot of detail but what seems to stand out in this biography in particular is that:

* Warhol had a lot of boyfriends, none for long, and he was ridiculously jealous.
* Warhol used people no end and generally didn't pay those who worked for him.

So I was left at the end with a decidedly negative impression of Warhol.

I'm suspicious. It didn't seem that Bockris explained how someone so creepy was able to get some many talented people to work with and hang out for him. All to be a part of the Warhol scene? For expectations of fame, money, connections? I don't know. I do know companies with a little liked leader. Still, it left me wondering if Bockris had something in for Warhol. I don't doubt there's some truth in Bockris' account of Warhol with boyfriends and assistants but I can't tell how much. Instead of resolving who Warhol was, this book makes me also wonder who Bockris is and leaves me seeking other books to learn more about Warhol.

This book covers every period in Andy Warhol's life with great detail including his childhood, his personal life and his career as an artist, filmmaker, publisher and celebrity.

Victor Bockris interviewed many members of Warhol's family, friends and teachers to tell the story of his impoverished youth in Pittsburgh, his time in college at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, working as a commerical artist in New York in the 1950s and his career as an artist.

It includes detailed descriptions from mulitple perspectives of the creation of some of Warhol's greatest works such as the film Empire and his book a: A Novel. There's also many quotes from Warhol himself, giving the reader some idea of how Warhol viewed his own work.