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(More customer reviews)With Pop Art entering its dotage, here come the book that delivers its fascinating youth and adolescence. Authors Scherman and Dalton, who clearly have earned themselves a Pulitzer if there is any justice in this world, form a genius tag team. Dalton, the insider, the eye witness, delivers the juicy gossip. Scherman, the talented journalist, delivers one of the great portraits of the American art world. The book focuses on the 1960s, the decade when the Pop artists of New York City completed the work of the Abstract Expressionists in the previous decade and knocked Europe off its pedestal to claim the center of the art universe.
Of course, at its center is the Dada of it all, Mr. Andy Warhola. We get a brief background of Andy's sickly childhood in Pittsburgh, where he escaped from a world of crowded immigrant flats and skin ailments by immersing himself in his mother's Hollywood fanzines. We follow him in his late teens to Carnegie Tech where he is both thought a fraud and a genius. There Andy discovers his penchant for shock with paintings that explore nose-picking and cross-dressing.
After graduation, Andy moves to New York and his fierce climb to the top begins. Warhol's ambition is shameless. He courts critics, dealers, Jasper Johns and anyone else that can move his career forward in the slightest. But he has the talent to match. His early work has him painting blow-ups of comic strips at least a year before the emergence of Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol, in the eyes of the authors, succeeds not because he hitches his wagon to the Pop tidal wave as much as he is the historical and personal embodiment of its ethos. The real achievement of this book, however, is that by the end the high priest of camp emerges as a hero as worthy as anything the Greeks had in their art.
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