Bøker av Blake Gopnik

Before Andy Warhol's rise to the peak of Pop Art, he created seductive drawings celebrating male beauty. His plan to publish these drawings in a book has now been realized. This volume has over 300 of Warhol's rarely seen, risque images that highlight the artist's fascination with the male form, droll humor, and ironic detachment.

A fascinating biography of the philanthropist Albert Barnes, whose pioneering collection of modern art was meant to transform America's soulFrom prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America's first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes became a ruthless advocate for their rights and needs. His vast art collection--180 Renoirs, 67 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 45 Picassos--was dedicated to enriching their cultural lives. A miner was more likely to get access than a mine owner.Gopnik's meticulous research reveals Barnes as a fierce advocate for the egalitarian ideals of his era's progressive movement. But while his friends in the movement worked to reshape American society, Barnes wanted to transform the nation's aesthetic life, taking art out of the hands of the elite and making it available to the average American.The Maverick's Museum offers a vivid picture of one of America's great eccentrics. The sheer ferocity of Barnes's democratic ambitions left him with more enemies than allies among people of all classes, but for a circle of intimates, he was a model of intelligence, generosity, and loyalty. In this compelling portrait, Gopnik reveals a life shaped by contradictions, one that left a lasting impact.

The definitive biography of a fascinating and paradoxical figure, one of the most influential artists of hisor anyage To this day, mention the name Andy Warhol to almost anyone and youll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhols name and dominated the publics image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that. In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was, as Gopnik writes. Thats why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure, from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the performance of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardomand his attempted assassination. The extent and range of Warhols success, and his deliberate attempts to thwart his biographers, means that it hasnt been easy to put together an accurate or complete image of him. But in this biography, unprecedented in its scope and detail as well as in its access to Warhols archives, Gopnik brings to life a figure who continues to fascinate because of his contradictionshe was known as sweet and caring to his loved ones but also a coldhearted manipulator; a deep-thinking avant-gardist but also a true lover of schlock and kitsch; a faithful churchgoer but also an eager sinner, skeptic, and cynic. Wide-ranging and immersive, Warhol gives us the most robust and intricate picture to date of a man and an artist who consistently defied easy categorization and whose life and work continue to profoundly affect our culture and society today.