The Many Lives of Andy Warhol

Book excerpt: The Many Lives of Andy Warhol is more than a biography: it’s a look into Warhol’s greatest creation: himself. Warhol was known as the king of pop art, but the famous artist was secretly never satisfied with a single style and his journey took him from graphic designs of shoes, women’s fashions and glamour magazines to owning and publishing his own film and gossip magazine, Interview. Stuart Lenig takes us behind the scenes to explore Warhol’s many innovations in the art world. Warhol was a titanic technician, making art from new techniques. His designs for Glamour and Vogue used a innovative blotted line technique for drawing and blotting the illustrations to make them appear printed. He turned common shoe designs into whimsical graphics. Warhol liked to shock people with images of death. Warhol caused a stir by making prints of a recently deceased Marilyn Monroe. He startled spectators with a paintings of a headline: “129 die in Jet.” Works that span Warhol’s entire career are discussed here alongside the continuing influence of diverse styles and forms that inspired them. He bought and collected antiques, classic Americana, camp and kitsch, primitive objects, and Native textiles. He was highly eclectic and saw nothing wrong with mixing and merging different historical styles. He blended Dada, Minimalism, Rococo, and Surrealism with abandon and finess. An introduction and ten chapters take readers through studies of the many lives of the artist as a performer, director, writer, technologist, printmaker, caricaturist, and critic of the art scene. In Warhol’s work we learn that the importance of the ancient and the contemporary form guided his renderings of the human form and his insights into contemporary society. He constantly reinvented and transformed his own language of signs. With lush descriptions and images,The Many Lives of Andy Warhol reveals Warhol's life and art in new ways provides exceptional insights into the artist at work.