Andy Warhol
Wayne Koestenbaum
Editions
| Cover |
Publisher |
ISBN Number |
Price |
Buy |
| hbk |
Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
0297646303 |
£12.99 |
n/a |
| pbk |
Phoenix |
0753813815 |
£6.99 |
 |
Review
The truly delightful Toodles Made The War Worth While 
pbk £4, a memoir by Arabella Boxer about her mother, begins with a tenuous and unlikely link to Andy Warhol, and on the basis that I knew him quite well for a short time in the late sixties and early seventies when he was going through a phase of being amused by any Brit-in-town, I ought to be able to produce a slim volume about him. Instead, Wayne Koestenbaum has done it for me, and although he never met the high priest of the “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” era, he has certainly caught many of the paradoxes of his subject. The tongue-tied communicator, the chintzy benefactor, the prudish voyeur and the shy bully are all represented here, in the ordered chaos over which he chose to reign.
Tate Britain’s exhibition of Warhol’s oeuvre is riveting (cf. Andy Warhol Retrospective pbk £29.99), and it includes his early ‘shoe drawings’, the movies, the books (these from an almost inarticulate man), the ‘happenings’ as well as the Brillo logos, the soup cans, the Marilyns and the Liz Taylors - which were, and which he reconfirmed as, classic American images.
Koestenbaum has already dealt with his fair share of legends in his biography of Jackie O, Jackie Under My Skin to which he brought wit, style and sensitivity (but not too much) as befits such a hallowed icon, and in The Queen's Throat pbk £14.50, where he shrewdly observed the twin phenomena of opera fans and divas with an insider’s flair and panache.
This is a lively, often saucy and sometimes irreverent view of one of the last century’s more surprising artists. I think Andy “Paperbag” would have approved. - review by Stewart Grimshaw
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