Nice the cat, with her shiny black body and beady eyes, is on the lookout. Someone has entered the house. Calm. A stranger has arrived, but he goes with the tenant, and his friend, Blake Gopnik. Nice disregards and returns to her resting place.
Gopnik, who settled with his wife, the artist Lucy Hogg, in this apartment on the west of 47th Street in Manhattan, has lived there since 2010. He assures that he did not know then that on that same street, although to the east, Andy Warhol had (1929-1987) his studio, named The Factory (in honor of his manufacturing background), and a key reference since 1964.
A premonition? Two years after moving in, Gopnik began an encyclopedic work, a biography on the father of pop art that culminated in 2020.
On the walls of his home hang paintings by Josef Albers – “they belong to my parents, they have lent them to me” – and paintings and photographs by Hogg. Not a trace of the admired protagonist of his book. “An art critic shouldn’t collect because that creates a conflict of interest,” he points out.
On the other hand, he does have a bookshelf full of books about his biographie, all of them read for documentation, along with 275 interviews –among them, that of Warhol’s first real boyfriend in 1953, Carl Willers, who told him that the artist “was bad in bed, not passionate” – and the consultation in the Warhol archive, in his hometown of Pittsburgh, of 100,000 documents.
“I had total access to what is probably the largest archive of an artist, it was an accumulator, it kept, for example, all the movie tickets. It is both terrifying and brilliant. The brilliant thing about Warhol is that every time he did something strange, he realized that that could be interesting art, so his file is also a work of art, ”he says.
The result of this work is the volume entitled Warhol, life as art (Penguin Random House), which is now published in Spanish. “His art changed, he changed”, he emphasizes to expose this link between the evolution of the work, the person and the time.
The story covers more than 1,000 pages, which are complemented by more than 700 online footnote comments.
A true bible. The book is read and the character is known more than the reader knows of his own family. “I know more about Warhol now than Warhol himself knew about him,” he jokes.
Had I let him, it would have reached 4,000 pages.
“I am an art historian and critic and I intend to be a biographer. I needed to write about Warhol because he is as complex as any other artist could be. I have gotten into a lot of trouble because in the last lines I affirm that he is as good as Picasso or maybe even better ”, he maintains.
Faced with the risk, he qualifies: “I am not saying that he is a greater artist than Picasso or Michelangelo, but I am completely sure that he is more influential today. There is still juice in Warhol that can be squeezed.”
Describing it, Gopnik comments that Warhol’s life was a parody of art. “It’s what makes it so great, it’s the irony and its complexity. It’s in the Cervantes tradition, where you never know what’s serious and what’s not. It’s the fact that he made fun of things, but you’re never sure where his sympathy lies. Was he making fun of Marilyn by doing her plays or was he sympathetic? The same complicated relationship with his creations as Cervantes ”.
Gopnik largely disproves that Warhol went to religious services as much as some emphasize, nor that he was a fervent believer. “There’s not a lot of evidence for this,” he replies. “I would say that for a gay person, a radical avant-garde artist, he went to church more often than he’s supposed to, if he’s expected to go at all,” he clarifies. “He said that he did not believe in an afterlife and therefore one cannot be serious when claiming that he was a devout Christian. We are in the sixties and you could not be a Christian if you slept with men and did not believe in eternal life. He was interested in the cultural phenomenon, ”he adds.
Behind all this, he observes a laundering operation. “They want to make him a good boy, deny that he was gay and a radical, which is what he was, a genius. I feel very uncomfortable when they try to disinfect it, ”he insists.
Warhol was a painter and much more. He did advertising, edited magazines like Interview, was linked to the Velvet Underground and made groundbreaking films. In some of his movies nothing happens. Gopnik compares the film Empire to Velázquez’s Las meninas in the sense that both are “exciting experiences”.
His text cannot be considered a panegyric, not even remotely, of the artist who popularized the quarter of an hour of fame. His stinginess is also documented, his ability to take advantage of others and forget them when he was not interested, his jealousy and envy of other artists, his struggle to pretend to be one thing and seek wealth from businessmen who would pay for him to do their ads or those who They posed to be photographed for the sole purpose of earning money. Here, in his discharge, he alludes to another Spanish referent: Goya.
“Those portraits of American high society are like the ones that Goya made of the aristocrats of the Bourbon court,” he specifies.
In addition to art and his work, Gopnik addresses in detail the life of Warhol, who settled in New York in 1949, inseparable from his creativity. He reveals that he felt such a fixation on Truman Capote after he published Other Voices, Other Environments, to the point that he sent him postcards daily and that he finally became friends after Capote’s mother received him, apparently in a drunken state. “It was the first openly gay book in the United States and was a model for the creative Warhol.”
He was concerned about his image (he wanted to look like a bohemian), he went to the gym, lifted weights – his lovers confess that he looked very good naked, “not at all effeminate” – and took amphetamines to lose weight.
He went to parties, although he was not a very social person, who preferred to keep quiet and take photos. But, on the contrary, he was obsessive with the phone. He called people daily. “He did not have to be present and show the mythical version of himself,” he justifies. He spoke with close friends and more than 1,000 recordings are preserved. I have been able to listen to some and it is different, creative, funny, it talks a lot about sex. Evidence from witnesses, says Gopnik. Warhol had a good size penis.
“I’m sorry I mentioned the size. But how can you debate whether or not he was obsessed with the penis? If he had not revealed it, he would have fallen into biographical negligence”.
Nice has not been seen anymore.
