Book Review: "Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol"

Pop Art was the Art of the Seventies

I remember seeing Andy Warhol on the streets of Manhattan, pale face and shlock of hair falling on his forehead.  I was looking at an icon.

book:  "Pop: the Genius of Andy Warhol" by Tony Scherman & David Dalton

This book is well written and riveting.  It's the first book that really answered for me the question "What is Pop Art?" I had often inquired of others and researched Pop Art, but was often confused, until reading this book. The detail and evolution of Andy Warhol's life and art is vividly depicted.

He's a fascinating character -- an extremely ambitious, hard-working man, masked beneath a nonchalant and detached outward persona. As a magazine illustrator, he would often burn the midnight oil to present clients with multiple versions for assignments.  

The word "complex" doesn't begin to describe Andy Warhol.

 Andy often contradicted himself: describing Pop Art as only depicting "the boringness of life" and elsewhere declaring Pop Art "as portraying the beauty of the ordinary".

Warhol's genius emerged early on when he was merely illustrating for I. Miller Shoes, doing shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line . His unusual flair was apparent and some artists actually collected these images to study. 

Andy's art flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by repetition, there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror.

He personified an American state of mind in which celebrity - the famous image of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity. 

Change Colors Marilyn SilkScreen (for fun)

 The authors explore Any's personality.  Andy was quite insecure -- he had an inferiority complex around fellow artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.  He was frequently sychophantic toward other artists, many of whom snubbed him at his own party after his first Stable Gallery show.

If you appreciate Pop Art and the era, and Andy Warhol -- get this book. You won't be disappointed.

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