If a biography is judged solely by its length and detail, then Blake Gopnik’s 900-page doorstopper about Andy Warhol can be safely adjudged to be definitive. But while I have no doubt that the book covers the key facts of the artist’s life, there still seems to be something missing.
Time and again, Gopnik tells us about Warhol’s shyness and social awkwardness but it is not made sufficiently clear how he still evolved to become such a charismatic and influential figure. In other words, we never get to the root of the magnetism that drew such a devoted following, particularly among life’s misfits, mavericks and outsiders.
One of the big challenges Gopnik faces, and never fully overcomes, is how to find the hidden truths behind a subject who was notoriously reticent. Warhol avoided interviews whenever possible and when he did agree to be questioned, he rarely dropped the pose and frequently gave one of three replies: Yes / No / I don’t know. Gopnik highlights the difficulty when he writes: “There’s hardly a single one of his most famous statements that he didn’t at some point contradict”.
In one uncharacteristically expansive answer, Warhol once said “I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use everyday and never think about.” This may explain why he replicated all those Campbell’s soup cans and reproduced Brillo boxes but doesn’t shed any light on the post-pop death and disaster series where he adapted not so beautiful images of electric chairs and car crashes.
Warhol’s work begs the question as to whether his most famous works should be regarded as a celebration or a critique of the spiritual poverty of mass culture. Gopnik acutely summarizes his modus operandi as “low culture being looked at from high” even though Warhol never presented his art in such terms. By playing dumb or faking ignorance, the artist effectively led the public a merry dance and forced the media to try to second guess his motives.
The excellent first line of the prelude to this biography is: “Andy Warhol died for the first time at 4.51pm on the third of June 1968.” This is a reference to the near fatal shooting at the hands of the unhinged Valerie Solanis as a means to promote her manifesto for S.C.U.M., her one woman society for cutting up men.
But, after this promising opening, we get a conventionally chronological guide with each of the fifty chapters titled by the years of his life. Since Warhol’s art went off at so many tangents – drawing, painting, screen printing, portraiture and filmmaking – a thematic rather than a strictly linear approach would surely have made more sense.
Furthermore, much of Gopnik’s writing is stodgy and overly reverential. Take this sentence about a museum installation the artist planned : “Warhol set out to undermine the ideas of tasteful discrimination and connoisseurial contemplation that museums normally stand for.” This point could have been expressed more simply but ,instead, the author takes a lofty standpoint as though in awe of Warhol’s daring.
Overall, while Gopnik boldly places Warhol’s homosexual identity centre stage, he is not critical enough when describing Warhol’s coldness and his regular habit of dropping people he decided were no longer useful to him. His ugly side came to the fore when his mother died. Warhol, ever the miser, stipulated that the cheapest funeral be prepared and then didn’t even bother to attend the service. If this is how he treated his nearest and dearest, you can imagine how he dealt with those he regarded as more expendable.
Warhol was nicknamed ‘Drella’ ( a morphing of Dracula and Cinderella) yet despite being likened to a blood-sucking princess, this was not meant maliciously as Lou Reed and John Cale’s affectionate album,’Songs for Drella’, shows.
Despite his selfishness and meanness, it is evident that Warhol needed his ego to be massaged on a daily basis. He would therefore have fully approved of Gopnik’s gushing praise for the movies he made. To say Warhol directed these films is pushing it because it is clear that he often did little more than set up the camera and left the rest to chance. Since the personalities and performers he attracted were often needy, screwed-up, over sexed, attention-seeking ‘freaks’ there was never any problem with getting them to act outrageously to order.
Although the end results look relatively tame now, the sexually explicit and deliberately transgressive content flaunted a ‘liberated’ lifestyle enough to shock straight audiences. Either that or, as with static shots of the Empire State Building or a man sleeping, they pushed the boundaries of boredom to the limit.
If you take Gopnik’s word for it, though, these are iconoclastic masterpieces of modern cinema. In my view, the star-struck author misjudges controversy and contrariness for quality. He makes the same error when praising the work of Dadaists. a major influence on Warhol’s provocative approach to art. For instance, Gopnik dubiously claims that Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (an upturned urinal) is the “most influential work of the 20th century” and the same exaggeration leads him to place Warhol on the same pedestal as Pablo Picasso.
What does become abundantly clear is that the public persona Andy Warhol created for himself was, ultimately, his greatest creation. He was a masterful assimilator rather than an innovator so instinctively knew how to generate the right kind of publicity. Gopnik calls him “the world’s greatest sponge” and applauds his ability to translate a “synthesis of nothingness” into unique works of art.
Warhol’s art was his life and his life was his art. He was a one-off to the point that even this exhaustively researched biography barely scratches the surface. Paul Morrissey, a key figure in Warhol’s Factory years, hit the nail on the head when he commented that any biography of Warhol should be based just on press clippings.
Gopnik obviously doesn’t take this approach but, although he interviewed more than 260 of the artist’s lovers, friends, colleagues and acquaintances and spent countless hours trawling through the Pittsburgh archives, much of the true nature of Andy Warhol remains a mystery. In consequence, we only get fleeting glimpses of the man behind the myth.
