Positive4Columns... a huge, meticulous tome ... The level of detail is impressive ... Warhol, born into poverty in Pittsburgh in 1928, had a work ethic driven both by an obsession with money and by a deep need for artistic acclaim. The through line of Gopnik’s book is Warhol’s constant, brilliant, and often ridiculous effort to satisfy these hungers ... Without sounding contrarian or condescending, Gopnik pushes back against simpler, standardized takes on Warhol ... to anyone interested in the material and financial history of the art world, or in the sausage-making details of the postwar art school–to-gallery pipeline, Warhol will be invaluable ... Warhol eschews both sensational revelation and armchair psychologizing ... The last seventeen years of Warhol’s life, almost half his professional career and fully two-thirds of his fine-art career, are given short shrift. Glossing over the sordid details of Warhol’s adventures at Studio 54 is forgivable ... fairness demands more coverage of New York during the AIDS epidemic ... we see him embrace the urbane camp of the ’50s; watch him bounce between the refined milieu of the Upper East Side and the more militant West Village in the ’60s; we follow him into the BDSM dens and club world of the ’70s. The sense of absence in the ’80s is disappointing, if only in comparison.
Benjamin Moser
Mixed4ColumnsDespite unprecedented access to Sontag’s archives, a wealth of insider interviews, and a life full of astounding events to reflect on, Moser spends much of his eight-hundred-plus-page tome in an extended symptomatology. Not content to scratch the surface of Sontag’s elegant, gloomy complexity, he insists on boring holes into it and exploring the psychoanalytic abyss he assumes must lie within ... In its later chapters, the book feels less episodic and analytic and more narrative; there is a clearer sense of scene and setting. Particularly illuminating is the treatment of Sontag’s relationship with Annie Leibovitz, the writer’s partner later in life and until her death ... The details of their relationship are surprising and often unpleasant, but Moser elicits blunt and candid statements from Leibovitz, whose evident cooperation makes the topic feel much less sordid and invasive ... Too often in Moser’s biography we find not individual works with individual meaning and merit, but rather a dense palimpsest of memories. Not Sontag’s memories, but our own memories of the book’s first chapters ... Tying the meaning of Sontag’s work only to her own history, Moser makes history itself merely a reflection of Sontag’s tormented genius, forgetting his own observation that Sontag \'envisioned a new approach, one freed from the morbid introspection she called ‘psychology.’\'
