Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Tony Scherman ,  David Dalton
Publisher:   HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Imprint:   HarperCollins
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 4.10cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.785kg
ISBN:  

9780066212432

ISBN 10:   006621243
Pages:   528
Publication Date:   15 November 2009
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock at warehouse  
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Reviews

Illuminating. --Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

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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