The Book Club: the warm, generous side of Andy Warhol

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

On this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam is joined by Blake Gopnik — the author of a monumental new biography of Andy Warhol. Blake tells Sam how everything — fame, money, and other human beings — were 'art supplies' to Warhol, but that underneath a succession of contrived personae Warhol could be warm, generous and even romantic; that the affectlessness of his art was not the expression of an affectless man; and that if he’d lived on, Gopnik thinks, he could have produced something equal to the late work of Titian.

The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you start listening to this podcast, we've got a special subscription offer. You can get 12
0:04.6	issues of The Spectator for £12, which will give you full access to everything on our website,
0:09.5	and we'll also throw in a free £20,000 Amazon voucher. Just go to spectator.com.uk
0:15.4	forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:24.1	Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:27.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:29.6	And this week, my guest is the writer Blake Gottnick,
0:32.4	who has just published a monumental and highly regarded new biography of Andy Warhol,
0:37.1	called Warhol A Life as Art.
0:39.9	Blake, welcome.
0:41.5	Thanks, Sam.
0:42.1	Your book begins, well, kind of in Medias, but it begins with Andy's first death,
0:47.6	an account of the time immediately after he's just been shot by Valerie Salonis.
0:52.1	Can you tell me why you started there?
0:54.0	I mean, what was it about
0:54.9	that moment that seemed to you to make it so pivotal? Well, certainly the moment is pivotal in
1:00.0	Andy's life, but I have to admit that it was also the result of just good fortune when it came
1:05.6	to writing the biography. I had the good luck to visit that surgeon who was still alive at that time. He still died. The surgeon who saved Andy's life. And I visited him with a fabulous American surgeon called John Ryan. So I actually got to hear these two great surgeons talking about the operation. And I heard every detail of how Andy was cut into and how they sewed him up again and all the
1:27.7	organs that were hit. And that was just so exciting for me to hear in the interview that I figured
1:33.3	it would be exciting for my readers as well. And it just seemed inevitable to begin with that
1:38.0	really dramatic moment in Warhol's life, one of the most dramatic moments that you could
1:42.5	imagine. In a pretty dramatic life. How did that moment change him?
	...

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