There are so many Warholian moments in this superb biography that it’s hard to know where to start. There is the time someone turned up to a party at the Factory dressed as a box of Brillo. Or the great man’s habit of answering a routine “How are you?” with a whispery “I’m OK but I have diarrhoea.” Or the social nightmare of being invited round to watch the unwatchable Sleep, a home movie consisting of five hours of a naked man snoozing. How to get through the ordeal without dropping off and starting to dribble on Andy’s shoulder? (Actually, this would never have happened – Warhol hated such physical contact and was capable of throwing out any guest who overstepped the mark.)
It is a testimony to Blake Gopnik’s skill that he is able to acknowledge how silly these provocations sound while simultaneously insisting on their enduring art historical significance. Dressing up as a box of Brillo may count as a stunt, but Gopnik, a veteran critic and contributor to the New York Times, sees it as the logical extension of Marcel Duchamp’s gesture 50 years earlier when he exhibited a porcelain pissoir as art. Responding to someone’s standard greeting with a detailed report on your bowel movements may be childish but it also pointedly disrupts the genteel discourse of a rapidly capitalising art market. The fact that today we are inclined to roll our eyes at such anecdotes is evidence not of Warhol’s nullity, but of his continuing ubiquity. Whether we like it or not, we are still living in his world. This spring’s Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern is one of the most eagerly awaited of recent years.
All the same, it would be wrong to imply that Gopnik’s book is one that Warhol might have written himself or, indeed, even liked very much. Far from being a ready-made, assembled from the detritus of the scholarly-industrial complex, Warhol: A Life As Art is the product of years studying 100,000 or so original documents housed in Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. The artist was a lifelong hoarder, and Gopnik’s research is intricately based on a florid haul of engagement diaries, business letters, love notes, theatre tickets and tax returns. To help the reader keep their bearings through nearly 1,000 pages, each chapter starts with a handy precis along the lines of “Classmates and teachers”; “A dose of failure”; “Window dressing”. It is a charmingly old-fashioned touch.
Perhaps Gopnik feels the need to supply these handholds because of the vertiginous nature of the claims he is about to make. The first, and most audacious, is that Warhol has “overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the 20th century”, even ascending to a spot on “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt”. This is big talk, but Gopnik persuasively assembles his case over the course of this mesmerising book, which is as much art history and philosophy as it is biography. For instance, rather than get caught up in the stale debate about whether Warhol’s silk-screens of Marilyn, Jackie and Mao were art, design, pop, mechanical reproduction or simply a bad joke, Gopnik argues that they serve to demolish the very terms on which such a discussion rests. “At his best, Warhol didn’t think outside the box,” he insists; “he thought outside any artistic universe whose laws would allow boxes to exist … Warhol always wanted to make work for a world where X and not-X would be true at the same time.”
Gopnik is also keen to dislodge the many canards about Warhol’s private life. The most adhesive of these is the one about him surrounding himself with every kind of kink and freak while remaining fastidiously hors de sexual combat. Gopnik carefully rummages through the laundry basket to reveal plenty of evidence that Warhol was an enthusiastic player in the NYC gay scene from the moment he first stepped off the Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh in 1949. What’s more, despite his self-consciousness about his patchy skin and baldness, there’s plenty of photographic and anecdotal evidence that Warhol had a gym-honed body with particularly good legs, and plenty of body hair. If we are determined to continue seeing Our Andy as fey and de-natured, Gopnik suggests, then it says more about our lingering homophobia that cannot bear to contemplate an artistic genius “caught in the act with men”.
The other myth he is keen to stamp on is the one about Warhol being deeply devout. While in his later years he took to popping in to the fabulously turreted St Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side, Warhol treated religion just as he treated everything else, which is to say entirely on his own terms. He avoided mass because it went on too long – five minutes, he opined, was quite enough for anyone – and shunned confession because he was convinced the priests would recognise him through the grille and gossip about his sins (and potentially disappoint him, perhaps, if they didn’t). He liked the clothes, the buildings and the props, and was not above splashing holy water around at home “as a kind of heavenly disinfectant”, but he left it to his mother, who was also his housemate, to keep the Warhola clan in good standing with their Rusyn-Carpathian God.
And then there’s the soup. “Almost every recollection of Warhol’s early days comes clogged with soup cans,” notes Gopnik wearily, and then proceeds to kick them away one by one. It is simply not true that Andy fell in love with the red and white Campbell’s tin in his early childhood, and then clung on to it for dear life as a highly charged transitional object with which to negotiate the perils of adult life. In Depression-era Pittsburgh, no one was flush enough to buy ready-mades for the table. Instead, Julia Warhola mushed together some water, salt, pepper and ketchup (the latter was allowed because it was Heinz, and Heinz owned Pittsburgh) into an approximation of something from the old country. Even once Andy’s career was taking off in New York, Mrs Warhola was still offering visitors chicken soup cooked from scratch, rather than poured from a tin.
The real origin story of Warhol’s encounter with Campbell’s soup will never be known. Various old-timers claim that they were the ones who first called Andy’s attention to the potential of the red and cream label with its folksy cursive font, even supplying him with the ur-can, the one from which all the others derive. But what really matters is not where Warhol got the soup, but what he was trying to do with it. The answer turns out to be nothing less than the destruction of painting’s then current dominant mode, abstract expressionism, which had held sway since the second world war. He knew he couldn’t drip like de Kooning or drop like Pollock and so, drawing on his decade as a commercial illustrator, he set about the radical business of returning subject matter to art.
It is hard now to recapture the shock of 1962 when the iterations of Campbell’s soup went on display at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (New York wasn’t interested). But the cumulative effect of their pristine forms, their tromp l’oeil construction, their obsessive reiteration (there were 32 prints, one for each flavour), luminous banality and, above all, their thereness, was to blast apart everything that we thought – and think – we know about art.
• Warhol is published by Allen Lane (RRP £35). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
