Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol

by David Dalton and Tony Scherman

Book Overview

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol is a groundbreaking reassessment of the most influential and controversial American artist of the second half of the 20th century. Writers Tony Scherman and David Dalton... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006621243X
• ISBN13: 9780066212432
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol

His name is Andrew Warhola, but he is famously known the world over as Andy Warhol. He is a "pop" artist from the 1960s who confounded the world with his fine creations because he looked at the sublime in all things common. You either like him or you don't. There's no ambivalent middle ground with someone like Warhol. His admirers consider him the most important artist since Picasso. But to his critics, he is the cynical magus of a movement that debased high art by reducing it into commodity. However you see him, Andy Warhol's controversial life, and art, is here to stay. In //Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol//, Tony Scherman and David Dalton gives you a major reassessment of Warhol's life, work and influence. This book "disentangles" the myths of the man as an artist--fraught with contradictions--from the man he truly was, and offers a vivid, entertaining, and provocative look at his personal and artistic evolution. This is a detailed, insightful chronicle of his rise, as well as a critical examination of his most important works. Drawing on fresh sources, including extensive interviews and insights with those who knew him best, //Pop// offers the most dynamic, comprehensive study of an artist who, in one way or the other, made us see the world differently. Reviewed by Dominique James

Pop

This is a very informative and well-researched book with a lot of interesting and verified takes on a very complex Guy we will never really know.

Portrait of A Fabulous American Hero

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.

Best book on Pop Art and Andy Warhol I've read!

This book is fabulous. 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. 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". But Warhol's genius emerged early on when he was merely illustrating shoe ads for I. Miller Shoes. His unusual flair was apparent and some artists actually collected these images to study. If you appreciate Pop Art and the era, and Andy Warhol -- get this book. Kudos to the authors -- you did a great job!