* * * * * 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 "," 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 "," 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 . 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. Everyone said that is just like his gold Marilyn. When he was a kid what was on the altar screen was Italian renaissance style against landscapes.

>> Deborah Solomon: But that is a literal reading of the argument, if you look at it in a broader sense that he was interesting in detected as move stars as if they were saints from the middle ages. Why doesn't that hold up?

>> Blake Gopnik: I don't know the difference between depicting movie stars as saints. I don't know the difference. >> Deborah Solomon: He it on the scale. His paintings that scale and immediacy of icons. They are also characterized by the idea they are not supposed to be original. They are supposed to duplicate an already existing icon -P in the world. I think some of the haunting power, for me comes from the association of the religious icons of the past. They are larger than life. They do have this other worldly power, you wonder and you look at it and you think why is this so gripping? He was not a great academic draftsman. But he had incredible talent for composition and arrangement and I just find that the early images are so magnetic.

>> Blake Gopnik: Yeah, I'm totally happy with that as an interpretation, put it that way. Mike Freed, great critic, fan of abstraction was the praise to the skies and he knew nothing about Warhol's background as a Catholic. In Andy's college textbook there is a discussion of gold ground icons and there is a gold from Venn year that. In general, Andy's religiosity. He was not devout in a normal sense. You couldn't be gay in 1940's and 50's and 60'S and count yourself as a good Catholic, but it is a great set of questions. I can talk about Marilyn has iconic without tying it to a religious backgrounds. I'm more interested in Andy as a sophisticated western artist like for our friend Jasper Johnson.

>> Deborah Solomon: It is interesting to read that he was a good student when he was younger. So many artists suffer from dyslexia and I always think when children tell me they are dyslexic that is almost a synonym for being an artist that is a creativity that others might no have. He was good at reading, writing and got good grades in school.

>> Blake Gopnik: His handwriting was weird, but artists who were dyslexic had problems and overcome them and that does not mean you're dumb or illiterate, he went on to publish books and works of art.

>> Deborah Solomon: He seemed so nonverbal in his public interviews.

>> Blake Gopnik: That is only at public. In private, he was at chatty as anyone could ever be, I heard a number of his telephone conversations and he could chat the ear off of anyone.

>> Deborah Solomon: What do you make of his public persona? I'm a naive, go ask somebody else, which was very boyish, obviously. Do you think it was a great way to get attention or that spoke to a naive part of himself -- no, not naive part of himself. He was not naive ever. What do you make of his persona?

>> Blake Gopnik: It arrives quite surprisingly late. He had already done his serious pop art and his first text that he loses on the world is a nice, old fashioned sophisticated paragraph about the relationship between his art and American society. It reads as a normal critical text by an artist and it is later that he becomes the goofy guy that says I don't know or the guy that says yes or no. Everyone you talk to who knew him in the 50's said he could talk up a storm. He could be extremely bright and smart about art, especially, I have lots of people on the record saying that.

>> Deborah Solomon: Right, of course, he had long phone conversations.

>> Blake Gopnik: Even more than live and they were smart. They were smart and savvy about art and he could go to a museum or a gallery and talk your ear off about art as well.

There are a couple of things happening when he goes for the Gee whiz persona, there is a movement in the 50's and 60'S when they said you shouldn't pay attention to the words of the artist. You didn't learn about art or text or pictures by asking the artist what the art is about. I think he internalized is that I'm not going to utter them and I will make them so dumb because the words of the artist were obviously wacky. He was not a great speaker in a kind of normal rhetorical way and he realized rather than be a mediocre speaker, he will be a non-speaker is a better route.

>> Deborah Solomon: It was an ineffective harm.

>> Blake Gopnik: It did him harm. People say he was a moron, he could not answer a question and it was part of a larger movement in the 80's called the put on. In the 60'S that was a live concept, the Beatles did it. Bob Dylan did it, the notion that you put on the mainstream reporter by refusing to answer questions or give wacky answers that is normal path of 60'S culture and I think Andy is one of the first to indulge in it.

>> Deborah Solomon: In a way it is the beginning of interview culture, not interview magazine, but people being interviewed. If you go back there aren't many interviews with artists historically, as you know and art news starred in a series in the 50's about following artists in their studios and that seems radical at the time. Nobody thought to interview artists in the 20's and 30's, you don't find interviews with Edward Hopper, maybe you just try to get out of this there as quickly and likely as possible. When did artists give wavy interviews?

>> Blake Gopnik: The 60'S was a great moment but the funny thing about Andy is he has a reputation for being silent, but he gave more interviews than anyone on the planet. One of the great things about writing this book and the horrors is the shear amount of interviews, he loved to contradict himself.

>> Deborah Solomon: I know. As you point out, he could not give a reliable date of birth. >> Blake Gopnik: Or place of birth.

>> Deborah Solomon: Sometimes it was Pittsburgh, sometimes it was Indianapolis, what was the other state?

>> Blake Gopnik: You name a city in the world and he was born there, Philadelphia as well.

>> Deborah Solomon: Right, so how did you feel about him writing the book? I get the sense that you felt basically admiring of him. Did you get frustrated and say I don't want to think about Andy for another day or you're happy to hang out with him for seven years or how long it took to write this.

>> Blake Gopnik: I was happy to hang out with him, not that I valued him as a human being particularly, but I think he was a better person than he alleged to be. He was a genius in my opinion. Fascinating thinker and ultra fascinating artist. If we believe there is other kind of intelligence, mathematical intelligence, his was an artistic intelligence. He knew what it was to intervene in the art world in really fascinating ways to cause trouble and that kept me interested from the moment I started working on hum until the very, very end.

>> Deborah Solomon: Of course, he began as a commercial artist, as everyone knows and was famous for his illustration of I. Miller's shoes. At what point do you think it occurred to him that he shows at the Stable Gallery and could hold his own? He did at some point make a conscious decision to leap into that world it with as leap, because he was in a different place. He was busy with all of the art directors, right? Was pursuing both careers all along?

>> Blake Gopnik: I think he made the decision in 1946, 1947, 1948 while he was in college. He was obviously the star of the department, doing things that nobody else was doing and if you look at his college assignments that exist, they are amazing.

>> Deborah Solomon: Like the blood, there was a blood drawing that you mentioned. He gave us -- he represented something with a splatter didn't he?

>> Blake Gopnik: Yeah, an amazing moment. He is asked to represent a story of a clearly gay boy from Pittsburgh who goes to New York and the sub text is to discover his gay self and he commits suicide at the end of the, it is a Novella, really, short story. They were asked to portray the moment he committed suicide and all of the students did bodies under tray. Andy submitted a sheet of white paper with red splat on it. It could be about Andy. It is an amazing way that maps on his own life, but it is referenced to expressionism. We're talking 1947, 1948 and Andy is figuring out this splashy expressionism exists and he can give it a figurative turn so that happens then. In the 50's, people forget he had lots and lots of art shows. They were all deeply gay themed, really radically gay themed and they were ignored. He was doing interesting work, not visually interesting, but interesting for its content and then in 61, by then he has seen amazing new work by Jasper Johnson. He has been in store windows as their colleague as a window dresser in 56 and 57. He realized the gay stuff isn't working for him and he finds this new pop art movement and very soon does the most daring and adventurous work in that mode and it happens in April of 61 is shown as props in a window, in a department store. It was very interesting stuff going on there, it is not just that he makes pop art. It is not that he borrows content -P from pop culture, but when he shows it as pop art, it is as objects within context of commercial culture. He always brought commercial culture into closer contact than his peers. Rob Liechenstein made paintings and the content was borrowed from popular culture.

Andy jumped into popular culture with both feet and became a figure in pop culture. He took the premise of pop art further than anyone else ever did and I think that is one of his great contributions.

>> Deborah Solomon: He kind of outed the advertising contempt of art or the close line between advertising and the close line. Everyone had kept that hidden before, many arts, American artists have worked in advertise, but they drew a line between the advertising work and their so-called high art. Warhol, instead of just elevating cartoons to high art the way Liechenstein did was open about the commercial aspects of high art.

>> Blake Gopnik: My argue isn't it was important to him that he was coming at this from the point of view of high art. It is not like you say that Marshelle was interested in plumbing and decided to make a urinal at high art. The most interesting way to do that is to incorporate himself into popular culture. I don't think he was keen in dissolving the boundary. He was interested in jumping over the boundary. He wanted to be a fine artists and when he did make commercial art it was the umbrella of business art that was a conceptual art, so he got to have his fancy cake and eat it, too.

>> Deborah Solomon: I was so interested in reading about Pittsburgh, was it outline or outlines gallery. Outlines gallery where he met John Cage in the 1940's. It is interesting, I think from the beginning that he knew he wanted to be a nontraditional artist. He was drawn to artists on the edge and weren't just doing what had been done before. What do we know about his interactions with Cage at that point in Pittsburgh?

>> Blake Gopnik: He was only a I can. He would have been maybe 14 years old, maybe 13. One of the things I emphasize is Cage comes to Pittsburgh for a whole month. He does a residency thanks to this outlines gallery, this short-lived gallery. It lived for five years in Pittsburgh, but it shared all of the most daring art, radical film. They invite Cage and Cunningham and it is the first time they appear as a couple in public. They weren't wildly out.

>> Deborah Solomon: No, therapy not out. They were never really out during their lifetime, they famously did not talk about being a gay couple and the furthest they would go from John Cage said he washed the dishes in the household and that was seen as a coded acknowledge of their unconventional living environment.

>> Blake Gopnik: There is a great movie that he did doing the dishes in the nude, which was interesting how he depicted gay house holding. I think when John Cage and Cunningham are sharing an apartment in 1940's, I think Andy and his gay cohort, it looked like he was acknowledged as gay in college, I think he had a gay identity in high school. I think he would have twigged that there is a chance that John Cage and Cunningham were more than just living together. I think gay culture was important for them and then they were an important example.

When he first moved to New York, the second place he lives, he rents an end of a loft from the great anthropologist's daughter and they were a lesbian couple and they changed their natural, so Andy arrives to New York and is thrown in the deep end of gay culture in New York and I think that shapes everything he does afterwards.

>> Deborah Solomon: That is one reason why people move to New York, right?

>> Blake Gopnik: Exactly, I could go on forever, but Pittsburgh was a nightmare to be gay and there is a special moral squad whose only job is to persecute gay men, so that is another reason why Warhol wanted to leave for New York.

>> Deborah Solomon: Of course, wondering, oh, how do you think Cage influenced Warhol, if he did? You said he was one of Warhol's mentors, in what way? I'm interested because it seems that John Cage is becoming an increasingly large figure on the New York scene in the 50's and it is fascinating that this composers who is known for his silences became such a defining figure for so many painters, so I'm wondering how you think he influenced Warhol or appealed to war hole? He was famously encouraging of other artists? He had a way of marveling, did Andy benefit from that?

>> Blake Gopnik: Andy loved the marvelous and produced the marvelous so that is right. I think there is chance in what Andy did. Letting stuff happen, a lot of his silk screens are badly made because he accepted every error that was introduced in the process of kind of lousy silk screening, which is what he would ever do. He would never do fussy silk screen.

>> Deborah Solomon: Did he know him at all?

>> Blake Gopnik: There is a story they can't prove that he stole objects from outlines gallery when Andy was a teenager. He would have seen his work already.

>> Deborah Solomon: Was he someone who would steal generally?

>> Blake Gopnik: He stole Cutlery and when I asked someone about that, they said you always do that on the Concord. You felt like you had some right to take home cutlery.

>> Deborah Solomon: It is conceivable because some were so small.

>> Blake Gopnik: These would have been the famous --

>> Deborah Solomon: Oh, that is terrible. The miniature reproductions, I could see why those would be tempting to anybody.

>> Blake Gopnik: Here is a surprise, once he was rich and famous, he collected a lot of radical conception artists that was interesting. When I came across his insurance appraisals at the Andy Warhol museum, every document is preserved, so I had receipts from his collecting and he is collecting the most radical performance art. He had an early Richard, this heavy object, so he collected the extreme cutting edge, which is what you expect from the goofy guy who says I don't know when he is asked a question.

>> Deborah Solomon: He was famous for his collecting. He had good taste.

>> Blake Gopnik: He is known for denture models from dentists. By the 70's and 80'S, he was buying everything that was buyable.

>> Deborah Solomon: Everything that didn't move?

>> Blake Gopnik: And some things that moved, too, but he never paid for those as far as I know.

>> Deborah Solomon: So researching the book, how much time did you spend in Pittsburgh where the Andy Warhol museum is located? Did you say there for a month, that sort of thing and go to the library every day and immerse yourself in time capsules?

>> Blake Gopnik: I would go for a week or two at a time and digest the thousands of photographs I took of the record. There was little time I was at in Pittsburgh because I was at the New York Public Library. Commercial art and commercial culture in the 50's and 60'S, they have every trade magazine. I think they have more than they realize. One of the greatest finds I made was the photograph of the window displays in New York and it turns out and pictures of displays by all of these people. In envelopes that have never been open.

>> Deborah Solomon: You and I have talked about how the whole field of window design, which was so integral in the emergence of pop art has not been well documented, so if there are any grad students watching tonight there is a great dissertation and book to be written on window design in New York in the 50's. Salvador is mentioned and the surrealist were involved in window design, but nobody has looked at the window design in the 50's.

>> Blake Gopnik: Not in the proper way, and the New York Public Library is the place to do it.

>> Deborah Solomon: It is hard to get information about the retail world. If we want information about galleries, we go to the archives of American art or any number of resources run by the Smithsonian or someone else, but if you want information about the retail world, it is really hard. I was trying to get information about windows at Tiffany's and I wrote to the Tiffany archive, which is in New Jersey and they said we exist to help people at the store. They are not there set up to provide historical information and where are all of the bond papers?

>> Blake Gopnik: They were destroyed when it went under, deliberately I heard. A lot was destroyed, but we won't go into that.

>> Deborah Solomon: We know who took over the building. It is now the Trump Tower and Trump famously promised to keep the art deco on the top of the building, which was destroyed in the process of demolition. It is interesting --

>> Blake Gopnik: Sorry.

>> Deborah Solomon: Retail records, it is good to know they are at the library, when the library reopens, which we hope is soon, I look forward to visiting those records. In the meantime, are you using the databases the New York Public Library?

>> Blake Gopnik: I always have. They have amazing access to every period. I think we should go to questions now because we have been talk a long time.

>> Deborah Solomon: They have expanded their databases.

>> Blake Gopnik: Which is brilliant.

>> Deborah Solomon: During the pandemic, so certain materials that weren't available before are there now.

>> Blake Gopnik: Go in ypl.org and use the facilities, because they are unbelievably great.

>> Deborah Solomon: We have many questions.

>> Blake Gopnik: Give me a hard one. Stump the chump. I'm going to hold up my book. One thing I want to mention about my book is there are amazing pictures of Andy. Every picture opens with a picture of Andy, some like this one never before seen. This was done by a gay teacher in college.

>> Deborah Solomon: Where did you find it?

>> Blake Gopnik: I was looking into the teacher and I found this image, so every chapter begins a full page picture of Andy, so you can watch him grow old.

>> Deborah Solomon: He never did grow old.

>> Blake Gopnik: 50 is as old as he got. What questions do you have for me.

>> Deborah Solomon: Why is Warhol's book and content largely ignored? I don't know what that means.

>> Blake Gopnik: I think other activities other than a fine artist.

>> Deborah Solomon: Warhol did drive out to Cornell's house once in Queens.

>> Blake Gopnik: No, they did overlap in the sense they had a mutual friend and it looks as Warhol, whether they learned in person.

>> Deborah Solomon: I think her name was Roman Gaffy.

>> Blake Gopnik: It is Gaffey. It was his first boyfriend who introduced them who worked at the New York Public Library. You know that Joseph Cornell showed his films. Warhol would have seen the experimental films there undoubtedly a huge influence, but also in Pittsburgh. Cornell's films were shown before anybody else did that shows how important that gallery is.

>> Deborah Solomon: Incredible story and brings wonderful prom Nance to Pittsburgh and the history of American modern art. What happened to Warhol's personal art collection after he died?

>> Blake Gopnik: That is an interesting question. In 1988 there was a huge sale, it lasted almost a week, maybe five days where they auctioned off thousands of items and some of the things never made it to auction. His Richard Sara, his early and important prop piece never made it to auction and I heard from the Richard Sara who wanted more information and I was able to tell them about the receipts that exist for that purchase. My guess is the people --

>> Deborah Solomon: Where is the work?

>> Blake Gopnik: Because it was a pile of lead, they probably threw I out. His followers were not knowledgeable about art, he said here is real art and there is no trace of the object at all.

>> Deborah Solomon: Some of the prop pieces were site specific.

>> Blake Gopnik: No, Warhol's was a sculpture. A lot of it was sold, but the most exciting pieces have sometimes gone missing actually.

>> Deborah Solomon: Some of it is at the Warhol museum.

>> Blake Gopnik: Did his actual collection go to the museum.

>> Deborah Solomon: They have the cookie jars.

>> Blake Gopnik: Yes, the non-art stuff.

>> Deborah Solomon: They have a big stuffed dog outside of the library.

>> Blake Gopnik: They have some of his art, the valuable stuff was sold.

>> Deborah Solomon: When I went to the museum, the collection was sold to the foundation and the foundation does not keep the museum going. They are two separate entities.

>> Blake Gopnik: They obviously have lots of links.

>> Deborah Solomon: So the museum is not supported by the foundation. They have to raise their own money.

>> Blake Gopnik: Not principally, but they get some support. I'm not privy to all of that, but there is some support.

>> Deborah Solomon: It wouldn't inherent his art collection, all of that went to the foundation in New York, right?

>> Blake Gopnik: A lot of it was give on the museum, a huge amount there was a founding collection.

>> Deborah Solomon: Good. It is a great institution. I enjoyed visiting there, you too?

>> Blake Gopnik: Yeah, I love spending time and Pittsburgh is a great city. I recommend a visit there and the food is great and I'm a foodie, so that meant a lot to me.

>> Deborah Solomon: Did you feel reluctant to share any unflattering details about Andy's life?

>> Blake Gopnik: Given that I mentioned his eight awards, the answer is no. I'm a historian. I'm not a defender. I have been accused of that, I think he is a generous and a fascinating person and a somewhat better human being than he is usually given credit for.

>> Deborah Solomon: I did not feel that from the book. I thought he was rather uncaring about people. I'm not judging him for that. I'm not expecting artists to be great nurturers of other artists, they tend to their own work and have to keep themselves going, but for instance, when his mother died Julia Warhola and he refused to go to the funeral.

>> Blake Gopnik: I think is the behavior is of the 60'S and the avant- garde and those ceremonial moments are not worth attending to. They reject them and that was fairly common in his world, so that actually isn't that bizarre of an activity, refusing to go to a funeral and he claimed she would not want to a big funeral. He says that to his brother in a telephone call.

>> Deborah Solomon: I don't mean to be judgmental about that, but he did not strike me as model charity.

>> Blake Gopnik: He was unbelievably generous and kind. I have no interest in shaming or defending, I don't think it is a job of a biography to pass judgment, but he seems to be somewhere between a demon and a Saint, most of us with like that. Lots of people said he was phenomenally generous and kind and mentoring them so both views seemed to exist among people who will knew him intimately.

>> Deborah Solomon: Can you tell us about Warhol's hoarding impulse?

>> Blake Gopnik: Yeah, it seems to start already. He is buying a lot of stuff in 1950's, but it is mostly good stuff. He is buying wacky antiques, but everyone is buying wacky -- what do you call it, pop culture stuff, store signs. He had a childhood illness and it seems to be a statistical correlation from people who suffer that, it is a dramatic fever. There seems to be correlation between that and childhood and hoarding behaviors or compulsive behavior in adulthood, in the 70's and 80'S, he becomes a real hoarder. He is buying more junk than anyone could ever use, diamonds, not good diamonds, but crappy diamonds. He is buying cookie jars by the dozen and he becomes an obsessive flea market. It is weird behavior. I used to flea market and you see the people there all of the time. There were people who are maniacal about it is a disease that you can catch.

>> Deborah Solomon: He was a world-class hoarder.

>> Blake Gopnik: I wouldn't say world class, but certainly bronze medal hoarder. He did not have it as a disease where it was debilitating, which the way it can.

>> Deborah Solomon: Like the brothers who died beneath their possessions. I don't think his possessions killed them. He enjoyed them.

>> Blake Gopnik: I don't like he likes what he shopped for. I think liked the act of shopping and that is a different thing.

>> Deborah Solomon: Did you talk to a psychologist or is that too hard to it after they have died?

>> Blake Gopnik: That slope is too slippery and I couldn't feed him any drugs to cure him. I did some reads on the medical literature.

>> Deborah Solomon: This is a good one, I think, all right, can you speak to Warhol's women artists?

>> Blake Gopnik: He supported women's art more than most mail shove any fact artists. He was influenced by Karisa, some of her early works are similar to his work.

>> Deborah Solomon: Did he collect those artists?

>> Blake Gopnik: That is a good question that I can't answer offhand. Yes, in a small way.

>> Deborah Solomon: What about Louise?

>> Blake Gopnik: He talked about her as a great artist. He was asked to come up with a list of great artists, great women artists and if you ask most male artists, Warhol had an answer. He said women artists were the greatest artists of all time and he was talking about the women he imagined weaving Navajo rugs. He had the notion that female textile workers were great, great artists. For his era, he was deeply influenced by women artists and interested in women's arts and had powerful and intelligent women around him.

>> Deborah Solomon: That is nice to hear. Of course, his reputation is of somebody who sat back passively and almost indifferently as the woman of the factory self destructed there was drug abuse, there is Edie's sad history that we know, what about that side of Warhol? Do you think that has been misrepresented?

>> Blake Gopnik: I think it has been hugely exaggerated, over emphasized. We're talking about the 60'S where everybody was going crazy. It was not as if the fact was the only place that people were doing drugs. It was not a crazy drug den, speed was the only drug being used there.

>> Deborah Solomon: To allow them to work more, right?

>> Blake Gopnik: Yeah, that is the way they talked about it, not only that, but they were some using it for recreational reasons, but in the lunacy, I think the factory was a disciplined place. During the day it was a working artist studio and a lot of crazy stuff went on after Warhol went home after Billy and his crowd of methamphetamine users. It is a whole other subject, but I think there is a slight exaggeration in that department, because it is a sexy story to tell.

>> Deborah Solomon: I would rather think of Warhol as an encourager than someone sitting around laughing as people were overdosing around him, but I think it sounds like you like him very much I find that. I do, too. we have to wrap this up in a minute, so we probably don't have time to discuss of his late work and what he thought about his Whitney museum show. A lot of us felt his work deteriorated in the 70's.

>> Blake Gopnik: I disagree. you have to read my book.

>> Deborah Solomon: You defended his late work.

>> Blake Gopnik: I'm not alone. There is more interest, the majority of art historians.

>> Deborah Solomon: You can't say the majority. We're talking about your, my opinion, it is not a matter of numbers.

>> Blake Gopnik: I'm saying a lot of people take it seriously.

>> Deborah Solomon: I know almost no one, dealers because they have access but I think it does not compare in intensity authenticity.

>> Deborah Solomon: What is your favor of the late work? What do you think is memorable?

>> Blake Gopnik: I think the camouflage paintings are interesting. I think the social, that the society portraits taken as a whole are fabulous attack on superficiality of American. We can end on that note.

>> Deborah Solomon: I was going to say the surfaces are so bal. The surfaces and your eye just rolled.

>> Blake Gopnik: You're so right, Deborah.

>> Deborah Solomon: Once you have seen one, you feel like you have seen them all.

>> Blake Gopnik: That is what makes them so great.

>> Deborah Solomon: I do love early Warhol and I enjoyed your book.

>> Blake Gopnik: Thank you.

>> Deborah Solomon: A lot of material that I was unfamiliar with and many people will be unfamiliar with and so I think in mostly sympathetic way and it also has the virtue of concentrating on the 60'S, which is the era most of us care about because it was so endlessly interesting.

>> Blake Gopnik: It is only half of the book is the 60'S, so I think that is the right balance.

>> Deborah Solomon: Yeah, no, I love it delve into the 50's and 60'S, because in an artist's early years generally tend to be more interest than the later years. Later years is celebrity, dinner parts, visits with Jackie Kennedy and all of that stuff and it doesn't really compare to the struggles of the early years. We like to read about struggle. People are more interesting before they come famous.

>> Blake Gopnik: That is why I'm interesting now. Once I'm famous, I'm going to be so boring. I'm planning on it.

>> Deborah Solomon: I think we can do one more question.

>> Blake Gopnik: We have two minutes.

>> Deborah Solomon: Maybe more, which party of all of the ones you read about, would you have most liked to attend?

>> Blake Gopnik: There was never as many parties as people think at the factory, so it is not as a central question. I haven't been a big party goer since I was 20. The party held after the Warhol showed his brillo boxes and the other boxes he made.

>> Deborah Solomon: That was 64.

>> Blake Gopnik: He has a party where they serve hot dogs and it is the first moment where the factory, which only existed for four months at that point, the silver factory comes into its own, so that is when the false image of Warhol in the factory is born. I would like to have been there as a fly on the walker not to dance, but take notes.

>> Deborah Solomon: Thank you for your good reporting, we feel like you were there as a fly on the wall. Blake, thank you so much.

>> Blake Gopnik: Thank you, Deborah.

>> Deborah Solomon: For your patience and helpful responses and to our audience. if there is an audience. I want to quickly say that I think Warhol would like Zoom because screens are such a big thing in his life from the silver screens in the movies to silk screens that he brought into his paintings.

>> Blake Gopnik: TV screens.

>> Deborah Solomon: He had a precocious understanding of screens and I don't think he would mind being discussed via Zoom.

>> Blake Gopnik: I think that is right.

>> Deborah Solomon: Thank you, Blake and thank you to everyone who joined us this evening. Thank you and the book is available for sale on the New York Public Library website. There is a shop, as well, even the library has a shop now.

>> Blake Gopnik: Nypl.org/shop. There are signed copies there, how do you like that? I signed bookplates and mailed them at a nice socially distance distant.

>> Deborah Solomon: I hope you were wearing gloves.

>> Blake Gopnik: I was in a hazmat suit.

>> Deborah Solomon: Good talking with you. Thank you very much.