Leamer wants depth but sacrifices it for breadth. Dipping in and out of so many lives in such a slim book yields the kind of surface treatment and repetitive clichés that might work as provocation in a Warhol screen print but make for a prose style unlikely to be anyone’s cup of soup ... Leamer is undeniably excellent at setting a scene, especially a louche one ... Minor sins might have been forgiven had I ultimately gleaned some deep or unforeseen insight into the lives of the book’s subjects ... Warhol, a shape-shifter so manic and intense that he could slide into several personas in the span of a single season, is here reduced to a necessarily static figure so that the women can bounce off him. Which is fine as a narrative strategy, but then not much happens to the women, either.
Sympathetic ... Like Cynthia Carr’s recent biography Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, Warhol’s Muses is a corrective. Leamer shows compassion when recounting the lives of these creative women. Warhol comes off as ruthless in his control of trusting companions, assailing their autonomy and emptying out their artistic ambitions ... What is still absent in his account is what else many women represented to Warhol ... In accentuating the humanity of these women who were made—and unmade—by the Factory, Leamer reveals Warhol as a master manipulator who used so many to build his 'most enduring creation: himself.'
Well-researched ... His art is a powerful statement on America, whether you ever knew him as a person or not. The characters in his life, even if they are gorgeous and tragic, are mere footnotes.
A mixed bag. His prose is adequate, if you ignore the clichés ... In the end, Leamer indicts Warhol for what might be described as emotional malfeasance.
Captivating ... Meticulous research, including interviews with Warhol’s assistants and transcriptions of his tapes, adds fly-on-the-wall immediacy to Leamer’s account. Readers will be riveted.
