Warhol: A Life as Art
BLAKE GOPNIK
(ALLEN LANE, 976 PP, £35)
Tablet bookshop price £31.50 •Tel 020 7799 4064

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola, in 1928, to Slovak immigrant parents in Pittsburgh, US. How a working-class boy came to anatomise his country in a handful of defining images (car crashes, race riots, electric chairs) is the subject of this huge and scrupulously researched biography by Blake Gopnik. At almost 1,000 pages, Warhol: A Life as Art makes significant demands on the reader’s time, patience and, one might add, wrists (the book is heavier than a brick). It is worth persevering, however, as Gopnik digs deep into the life of one of the most unlikely mythmakers of our time.

Before Warhol made his name in the early 1960s with his mass-produced Pop Art, the “genteel” world of easel painting had been violently rejected by the abstract expressionists, Gopnik reminds us. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other American intransigents had spattered and jabbed at their canvases with paint. Their influence was often baleful, though. The British artist William Green, who studied in the late 1950s under Professor Carel Weight at the Royal College of Art, made giant aggressive abstracts by riding a bicycle over hardboards saturated in paraffin or bitumen. (“So much for the undercoat,” the comedian Tony Hancock lampooned Green in his 1961 film The Rebel.)