MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)Andy Warhol had a big dick. I reveal this immediately for three reasons. First, to sound an appropriate note for Blake Gopnik’s 976-page whopper of a biography, a tome so intimately informed that it is impossible to imagine its depth of detail ever being out-mined. Second, because the artist’s sex life is a key focus of the book. Third, and most important, because it’s a question that nobody is asking, but everyone is thinking: and if Warhol taught us anything in his art it is not to search too loftily in humanity for motivations and directions ... Gopnik,...clearly has no doubts about the size and scope of Andy’s achievement — the word \'genius\' gets several tremulous outings — but the view from Manhattan is not yet the view from everywhere else. Warhol’s eventual importance is far from settled ... it is impossible to imagine anyone finding out much more about Andy than is recorded here. In that sense it’s definitive ... But big-picture conclusions are not what this book does best. Its diary format, its division into years, is great for detail, but less great for overviews. When it comes to Warhol’s films, each of which gets a slab of book to itself, we are definitely in the realm of too much information ... For all its weight and length, Warhol: A Life as Art feels a tad premature. The next Warhol biographer hasn’t a hope of bringing more detail to the task, that’s been done. What they might bring is a truer perspective.
Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake
RaveThe Times (UK)Life with Picasso is many impressive things, but most certainly it is not a revenge document or a Picasso-kicking or a #MeToo kiss and thrust. Mistaking it for any of those things would be plain wrong. From the first word to the last this is, above all, a love story. Painful, yes. Complex, yes. Doomed, yes. But still a love story ... Gilot writes so well about the opening rounds of her Picasso time. She has an ear for a good anecdote and, as everyone who was anyone in global culture turned up at some point on the doorstep, her impressive powers of recall have a field day with the cast list ... in the conversations with her antique lover about art, remembered in extraordinary detail, that Gilot’s book mines its second seam of brilliance. They are some of the best conversations about 20th-century art you will ever encounter ... the first three-quarters of the book offer a gripping mix of love, aesthetics and hilarious anecdotes. But then suddenly it darkens. Having persuaded Gilot to have children to fulfil herself as a woman, Picasso turns into the monster we have been expecting from the beginning ... But it is another of this book’s many strong points that it is only when the illusions pop for [Gilot], that they also pop for us.
