"布莱克•格普尼克（Blake Gopnik）的权威传记深入挖掘了他身上存在的使安迪•沃霍尔（Andy Warhol）彻底改变我们文化世界的自相矛盾和激进的天才。

基于多年的档案研究和对沃霍尔数百位幸存的朋友，恋人和敌人的采访，《沃霍尔》追溯了这位艺术家的成长之路：从20世纪30年代住在匹兹堡的东欧移民的贫穷儿子的出身，到他早期作为商业插画家的成功和他进入美术领域的这一开创性的转折点，再到70和80年代的社会肖像和流行名人形象，因为他反映了不断变化的商业和文化动态，并对此作出了回应。

《沃霍尔》充满了对这位艺术家的作品和个性的新见解，它提出了一个问题：他是个笑话还是天才，是激进分子还是攀附上流社会的人？正如沃霍尔本人常常回答的那样：是的。

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"When critics attacked Andy Warhol's Marilyn paintings as shallow, the Pop artist was happy to present himself as shallower still: he claimed that he silkscreened to avoid the hard work of painting, although he was actually a meticulous workaholic; in interviews he presented himself as a silly naïf when in private he was the canniest of sophisticates. Blake Gopnik's definitive biography digs deep into the contradictions and radical genius that led Andy Warhol to revolutionise our cultural world.  

Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol's surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist's path from his origins as the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants in 1930s Pittsburgh, through his early success as a commercial illustrator and his ground-breaking pivot into fine art, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity of the '70s and '80s, as he reflected and responded to the changing dynamics of commerce and culture.  

Warhol sought out all the most glamorous figures of his times - Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, the Barons de Rothschild - despite being burdened with an almost crippling shyness. Behind the public glitter of the artist's Factory, with its superstars, drag queens and socialites, there was a man who lived with his mother for much of his life and guarded the privacy of his home. He overcame the vicious homophobia of his youth to become a symbol of gay achievement, while always seeking the pleasures of traditional romance and coupledom. (Warhol explodes the myth of his asexuality.)   

Filled with new insights into the artist's work and personality, Warhol asks: was he a joke or a genius, a radical or a social climber? As Warhol himself would have answered: yes.  

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