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Blake Gopnik Transcript * * * * * Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility. CART captioning and this realtime file may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> Salvatore: Welcome to the New York Public Library. Now is the moment we would typically ask you to silence your cell phone, but in the brave new world, your cell phones and computer have been muted. Along with NYPL Live, we have the first conversation that will discuss the biography of "Warhol," of the life and work of we all know who. My name is Salvatore, director of the Lewis B. Coleman center at the New York Public Library. The Coleman center selects fellows for a nine- month term. They receive a stipend to focus exclusively on their work. The fellows the best and most promising academics, playwrights, critics, dramas, artists and fiction artists of day. They come to use the unparalleled collections to write the books of tomorrow. The program was founded in 1999, to date, it has sported the work of 300 fellows. Blake Gopnik had been scheduled to speak at the library as part of the series, disappointing to not share a room with them, but him and Deborah agreed to share this space. You with purchase "Warhol" through the library shop. Go to nypl.org/shop. Blake Gopnik will be interviewed by Deborah Solomon. Her weekly column appeared in the times magazines from 2003-2011. Her books include Jackson Pollock, utopia parkway, the life of Joseph Cornell and the art of Rockwell, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Time’s book award for biography. In 2001, Ms. Solomon was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim foundation. She is at work of a full-scale biography Jasper Johnsons. Blake Gopnik has been staff art critical you can at "The Washington Post," Newsweek and attar and world.com. He has a PhD in art history from Oxford University. He worked on "Warhol" during his fellowship in 2017-2018. The library has patrons and it has readers and researchers and internally, it has another category, power users, users who vacuum up materials over the hours, days, weeks and years in service of a singular great project. Among them, Blake has become legendary. A writer so devoted to his project that he came in before the library opened and stayed until it closed with the intent to write at the first authoritative look on Andy Warhol. This event is being simulcast on Zoom and Youtube. If you have any technical difficulties, bear with us and we will sort it out. This event is being recorded. You are not being recorded, only Blake, Deborah and me. Blake will be glad to answer some of your questions. If you have a question, type it into the Q&A box at the bottom of the Zoom app. We will make sure Blake sees them, although he may not have time to answer everything with, that I leave it to Blake Gopnik and Deborah Solomon. >> Blake Gopnik: Thank you. It brought me back fond memory, my days, weeks at the library. Day and notice. >> Deborah Solomon: Hello. Thank you for that generous introduction. Blake, I want to start off by talking about mothers, if you don't mind, because it seems to me so often in biographies that mothers depicted as horrible villains. You're aware of this. Mothers are captured as the domineering figures who undermine their son's fragile egos. >> Blake Gopnik: We're not talking about my mother. I just want to go on record. >> Deborah Solomon: Nor mine. For instance, women in the 50's were likened to the appearance of his rather strong-willed mother and one thing I really enjoyed about your book is it presents us with, I think the most interesting mother in art, since Anna McNeil When I will her. Julia Warhol was a great inspiration to her son and an artist herself to some extent. I was wondering if you could tell us what you know about her and if you think she influenced her son's great calling. >> Blake Gopnik: It was one of the surprises when writing a biography. There are things you think you know and there are things that take you by surprise. You imagine, I imagined that she was an old country b URS hika and she was an old country lady in her own country ways. The more I dug into her past, it is clear from the tiny village on the border of Poland and Slovakia, she was already considered, unusual, cultured, someone who stood out from the crowd and I think she inspired Andy to be the same kind of person. >> Deborah Solomon: You say she gave him art materials. Art mixing was a very productive use of his time. >> Blake Gopnik: How many mothers in the Great Depression spent their hard-earned money on art supplies for their kids? >> Deborah Solomon: I know you mentioned that she made metal flowers from tins and she would recycle old tins. >> Blake Gopnik: That is right. >> Deborah Solomon: There is a reference to an altar piece. >> Blake Gopnik: Think is something any self respecting Catholic woman from the old country would have made. I don't know if she thought of herself as an artist. I interviewed her side of the family and they live an hour from Pittsburgh and that family prides itself in culture. I don't think she thought of someone who made art objects, but being culture and exocentric was very important to her. I think the mother was central here and she was hugely ambitious to be a cultural figure and he took the lessons to heart. Julia Warhola did some of the lettering and he learned thousand copy her lettering. She was important to him in a commercial side of it. She is the subject of an early film by him where one of his boyfriends was in it, too, so there is an interesting film called Mrs. Warhol where she stars. >> Deborah Solomon: She moved from New York to Pittsburgh where Andy grew up to live in Andy's basement. >> Blake Gopnik: She moved in 52 before he had a basement when he lived in a hell hole with rats. >> Deborah Solomon: She claimed she found 97 shirts of his that needed to be laundered. >> Blake Gopnik: That is where you get themy call numbers. Numbers in biography, they stand for a whole lot. >> Deborah Solomon: I was going to say some numbers are valid, but 97 is true. I doubt Andy Warhol had 97 shirts in 1952. >> Blake Gopnik: It is doubtful, but he did become someone who bought shirts in quantity from brooks brothers. He was buying excellent stuff, high-end clothing. >> Deborah Solomon: OK, have you seen any of the mother's artwork? >> Blake Gopnik: Yes, there is a book called "holy cats" that is clearly by her and there are drawings that survived for that. She drew Angeles percent pit is important to recognize that Andy and this is a central theme in my book, oh, this is write should hold it up. Here it is the book. Look at the lovely spine. We worked hard on that spine. There is my little ad. She wasn't a great ad. She was an outsider artist of no huge importance. I think it is a mistake to see Andy's objects mattering as the way his pop art mattered, but she was an interesting figure. She was an outsider and I have written, not in this book, but in an essay that Andy being an outsider artist was important in Pittsburgh when he was growing up and he channeled that in the 50's. Is always an outsider artist, culturally, outsider. >> Deborah Solomon: I know he grew up in an Eastern Orthodox family. >> Blake Gopnik: No. Very perform, not to say he is not an orthodox. They were Greek Catholics. >> Deborah Solomon: That is Eastern Orthodox. >> Blake Gopnik: They will fight you tooth and nail. >> Deborah Solomon: I'm not saying Roman Catholic. >> Blake Gopnik: They were Roman Catholic. >> Deborah Solomon: No, they were not Roman Catholic. >> Blake Gopnik: They are Roman Catholics. Sorry. Let's move on before we have a fight. >> Deborah Solomon: I noticed in an Eastern European cemetery in Pittsburgh and that was the religion of his mother. The reason I'm bringing it up and this is hardly an original view, I always thought he was influenced by religion and that his works, if we start with Marilyn in 1962 do refer to iconic imagery, as in religious icons and one of his great achievements was to move the icon from the realm of religion into the world of pop culture. You kind of knocked that down in the book, you knocked down almost every theory in the book, your deconstruction in some ways, but I like that theory, because I do think the early pictures, the great pictures, such as the Marilyn portrait hark back to religious icons, especially as you know, the gold Marilyn was in his first show and purchased by Phillip Johnson of museum of modern art. Why are you so glib in the book? You say it could be the gold of Miami beach, the gold of money, why didn't you take that seriously considering this I went to church his whole life and grew up in a religious household? >> Blake Gopnik: What I was attacking is a notion of commonplace. if you go where he grew up there are gold icons on the altar screen.
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