Overview

"He was the magus of pop. He debased high art - 5,000 years of sublime visions and shimmering varnishes - and reduced it to a commodity. With a sleight of hand, Andy Warhol redefined the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and film, bending them to serve the purpose of his vision. Taking its subject from comic books, tabloids, Hollywood publicity shots, and supermarket aisles, ""Pop Art"", with Warhol at the forefront and his ""Factory"" at its nexus, broke through the entrenched avant-garde of Abstract Expressionism, and reinvented pop culture. Beneath the deceptively simple surface of his silk screens, the old hierarchies of art collapsed. The assembly-line effect of his 'machine-made' images allowed Warhol to fix the viewer's gaze on mass culture, closing the gap between art and life, and redirecting the artist's awareness outward: to the teeming, exciting, vulgar new world of sixties America. Warhol would take from pop culture and pop culture would take from Warhol. But who was the man behind the public pose? ""The Factory"" was driven by sexual experimentation and the obsessive pursuit of beauty, but the figure at its center somehow remained apart. His inherent discomfort with physical intimacy and his perpetual place outside the art establishment meant that Warhol would observe but never engage, that he wanted to be seen, but was never discovered. At long last, as a result of extensive new interviews and insight from those who knew him best, the inherited myth of Warhol - fraught with contradictions - is disentangled from the man he truly was."

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9780066212432

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Reviews

Illuminating. --Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

[A] fascinating study of Warhol's rise from commercial artist to the most celebrated painter and filmmaker in 1960s America. --Richard Dorment, New York Review of Books [Draws] for the first time on full use of the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. . . . [A] crazy, amazing, compelling story. This book does it justice. --Maria Puente, USA Today A sharp-eyed chronicle of those unsettled days in the early sixties when everything was up for grabs. . . . Pulling back the curtain, this fascinating book takes the true measure of Andy Warhol, the pale, enigmatic Wizard of Odd. --Fred Goodman, author of The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce An excellent book, a work of great clarity and concision that makes Warhol (and rock critics) feel fresh again. --Deborah Solomon, New York Times Book Review Andy was fascinated with the speed and acceleration of life. This book beautifully conveys the sixties and his inner world. This is as close as you are going to get to the enigmatic Andy that I knew and liked. --James Rosenquist If you want to know how Andrew Warhola became Andy Warhol, read this book. --Barbara Rose, Author of American Art Since 1900 Illuminating. --Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times Mr. 15 minutes of fame gets 441 well-researched pages. --People No stone is left unturned in this insightful, entertaining biography, which also offers a fascinating account of the crazy visionary sixties decade. A must-read, POP is a fun trip into the complex world of the madman plastic inevitable genius that was Andy Warhol. --Robert Heide, playwright Riveting.... Exhaustively researched, seductively written. --Michael Slenske, InterviewMagazine.com Scherman, a music writer, and Dalton, an art writer who briefly worked as an assistant to Warhol, entertainingly trace the artist rise from sickly, poor art student to a wealthy, prize winning Manhattan advertising designer to the most unlikely avant-garde painter of all time. --Fred Kaplan, Washington Post Scholarly, impeccably researched and well written, POP immerses us in the fast-moving, dissolute life of Andy Warhol. . . . No one could, or can, be indifferent to Warhol. This book gives us a deeply insightful portrait of the tormented man behind the myth. --Antony Penrose, director of the Lee Miller Archive and the Penrose Collection What a feast of deep and penetrating investigation! Out of this wealth of fascinating detail-thousands of stories, observations, conversations-Tony Scherman and David Dalton have beautifully mapped out the making of the remarkable life and art of one of the greatest rebel heroes and innovative liberators in art history. --Tony Shafrazi A comprehensive reappraisal. . . . Both an indelible portrait of the artist as a weird young man and an elegant survey of one of the most vital and revolutionary periods in American popular culture-a richly detailed, kaleidoscopic treat. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Riveting.... Exhaustively researched, seductively written. -- Michael Slenske, InterviewMagazine.com

Author Information

Tony Scherman is the author of Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story, which won a 2000 ASCAP - Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing. He was an editor at Musician and Audio; a contributing editor at Life; and has written about art, music, American history, and American culture for dozens of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, American Heritage, New York, Entertainment Weekly, People, and the New York Times Arts and Leisure Section. A piece he wrote for American Heritage was the basis for the Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters. A founding editor of Rolling Stone and pop culture writer with 30 years of experience, David Dalton has authored and co-authored numerous biographies, including Mr. Mojo Risin: Jim Morrison, The Last Holy Fool; Faithfull, the Autobiography of Marianne Faithfull; and El Sid: Saint Vicious. He is a winner of the Columbia School of Journalism Award.

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