Artsy Reads: Andy Warhol | Artists Community

Let’s begin with The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Again Once more) from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, in 1975, when the artist was in full swing. Though attributed to Warhol, frequent collaborator Pat Hackett and Interview Journal editor Bob Colacello have been very a lot concerned. Colacello additionally gave us Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Shut Up (Harper Collins, 1990, reissued in 2014), an “insider’s portrait.” Like all of us, Warhol confronted challenges, however apparently he didn’t fret over them. As he put it, “Typically folks let the identical downside make them depressing for years after they may simply say, ‘So what.’” Warhol apparently signed some 14,000 copies of The Philosophy earlier than it it was distributed, and people books at the moment are priced within the 1000’s.

Victor Bockris’s The Life and Demise of Andy Warhol was first printed by Bantam Books, in 1989, two years after Warhol’s demise, and the guide was then expanded and up to date by Da Capo Press, in 2003. A piece of it touches on the artist’s upbringing in Pittsburgh, which is fittingly dwelling to the Andy Warhol Museum. As a youth, Warhol was suffering from a uncommon nervous system illness and spent weeks at dwelling in mattress coloring and making collages. The guide turned me on to the artist’s early haunts, a number of of which I visited, although one was very a lot beneath the radar, even prevented by people on the Warhol Museum.

For these with an amazing fondness for Warhol’s work, David Bourdon’s Warhol (Abrams, 1989) is unmissable. Bourdon was each an artwork critic and a buddy, so he knew the artist nicely. The guide gives a take a look at Warhol lounging on a reclaimed sofa in The Manufacturing unit, his New York studio. His soup cans are on full show inside its pages, alongside along with his now-classic takes on Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, which initially failed to seek out an viewers, one gallery proprietor saying, “They didn’t look sufficient like artwork. They appeared machine-made.” Celebrities rule the latter pages, as Warhol was usually commissioned to do portraits of the wealthy and well-known, his principal supply of earnings, in accordance with Bourdon. Gallery bigwigs like Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, and Ivan Karp additionally seem.

Warhol by artwork critic Blake Gopnik (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2020) is billed as “the definitive biography,” and rightly so, because it is available in at a whopping 976 pages. The Sunday Instances was impressed, noting, “It’s not possible to think about anybody discovering out rather more about Andy than is recorded right here.” There’s one thing of curiosity on virtually each web page, so it can hold you engaged. Gopnik’s guide wraps with an intriguing paragraph, asserting that Warhol has “overtaken Picasso as crucial and influential artist of the twentieth century.” In truth, Gopnik places him proper up there with Michelangelo and Rembrandt “on the highest peak of Parnassus.”

I not too long ago chanced upon late Warhol archivist Matt Wrbican’s A is for Archive: Warhol’s World from A to Z (Yale College Press, 2019), to which Gopnik is a contributor. Describing it as profusely illustrated doesn’t do it justice. It’s chock filled with surprises, too—the whole lot from Richard Nixon hand puppets to Warhol’s assortment of dental fashions, from a letter to the artist from hockey nice Wayne Gretzky to reminiscences of Warhol’s mom, Julia, and from Warhol’s wigs to his assortment of cowboy boots. There’s even a chapter on all of the commiserations he obtained after his near-fatal capturing on the hand of Valerie Solanas.

Lastly, you may additionally wish to take a look at Edie: American Lady (Knopf, 1982, after which Grove Press, 1994) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, specializing in ill-fated actress Edie Sedgwick, for a time Warhol’s near-constant companion. The movie Manufacturing unit Lady adopted in 2006, with Sienna Miller as Edie and Man Pearce as Warhol.