Many Andies

Andrew O’Hagan

Shoes, Shoes, Shoes by Andy Warhol
Bulfinch Press, 35 pp, $10.95, May 1997, ISBN 0 8212 2319 4
Style, Style, Style by Andy Warhol
Bulfinch Press, 30 pp, $10.95, May 1997, ISBN 0 8212 2320 8
Who is Andy Warhol? edited by Colin MacCabe, Mark Francis and Peter Wollen
BFI, 162 pp, £40.00, May 1997, ISBN 0 581 70588 2
All Tomorrow’s Parties: Billy Name’s Photographs of Andy Warhol’s Factory by Billy Name
frieze, 144 pp, £19.95, April 1997, ISBN 0 9527414 1 5
The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night by Anthony Haden-Guest
Morrow, 404 pp, $25.00, April 1996, ISBN 0 688 14151 X

All his life Andy Warhol looked like death. He came into the world that way: blank, rheumy-eyed, sick as the day was long. An unmerry child with St Vitus’ Dance, the young Warhol lay twitching in his bed under a blanket of fan magazines, the source of all his imaginary friendships – with Errol Flynn and Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Gary Cooper – and the only thing he craved in those Pittsburgh days was the chance to be as lovable as Shirley Temple. The adult Warhol looked as much like death and lived as much by desire. A mobile presentation of 20th-century estrangement. A man in a wig in a season in hell. ‘A sphinx without a secret,’ said Truman Capote; ‘the Ecce Homo of modern exhibitionism,’ said Stephen Spender. For his own part, Warhol was intensely reasonable: ‘I just want to be a machine,’ he said.

You are not logged in

If you have already registered then you can login here
If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
If you are a member of a subscribing institution or university library please login here
If you have an institutional print subscription without online access then you can find out about our institutional online subscriptions here

Vol. 19 No. 20 · 16 October 1997 » Andrew O’Hagan » Many Andies (print version)
pages 12-13 | 3137 words