The Spectator - 29.02.2020

36 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.uk

BOOKS & ARTS

The wizard that was Warhol

the falcon eggs in concealed pockets about

his person. He timed the smuggling trips so

that the embryos remained viable and could

hatch into lucrative young birds on arrival.

To do this he had to climb to nests in

Greenland or Chile, or the steep-sided

gorges of the Rhondda Valley, and then fly

to Dubai within hours of stealing the eggs.

It sounds logistically impressive and full

of derring-do. But the final image we get

of this master criminal is much more pro-

saic and perhaps sadder even than Ham-

mer himself acknowledges (in the course

of assembling his story the author has been

clearly touched by Lendrum’s undoubted

charisma and persuasive charm).

In the end, Hammer cannot indicate the

full extent of his subject’s criminal prac-

tice. But the man has now been charged

and found guilty five times on four conti-

nents, has served two spells in British pris-

ons and has absconded from a seven-year

sentence in Brazil. Money was almost cer-

tainly the primary motive for Lendrum; yet

in the concluding pages we meet a man who

is unemployed and homeless, and whose

criminality has damaged most of his close

relationships. There is precious little sign of

financial profit, let alone happiness.

One caveat about this absorbing, enter-

taining and well-written book: Hammer’s

grasp of ornithology is shaky. There is no

such species as black pelican; lapwings

don’t dive for fish, they eat invertebrates;

harrier hawks don’t occur in Britain; a ‘less-

er gull’ is really a lesser black-backed gull;

they are — oddly perhaps — called Cana-

da geese, not ‘Canadian geese’; and lesser

yellowlegs are not woodland birds

but waders.

Most erroneous of all is what Ham-

mer chooses to call ‘the fragile, symbiotic

relationship between man and the wild’.

Almost every falconer we meet in this book

suggests that no such relationship exists.

The great taboo-breaker

Duncan Fallowell

Warhol: A Life as Art

by Blake Gopnik

Allen Lane, £25, pp. 930

In 1983 I was sent to New York to interview

Johnny Rotten and I took the opportunity

to call on Andy Warhol. The Factory was in

the phonebook; and the receptionist, Brig-

id Berlin, said that Andy was in Milan but

would be back the following afternoon. ‘You

better give him half an hour. Why don’t you

come over at 2.30 p.m.?’ So I did.

I’d never been part of that New York

scene, but wanted to meet someone who

had helped me develop my own freedoms

almost 20 years earlier. According to Blake

Gopnik’s book, I should have found a studio

be looked after by his mother. Gopnik sees

this as an example of Warhol’s irony, but that

is wrong. It’s not his irony, it’s ours.

Among Gopnik’s sources too there are

numerous conflicting views on Warhol’s

character: he was cold, he was kind, he was

bad at sex, good at sex, witty, dumb, know-

ing, naive. Many sources are quoted directly

at length without being identified by name,

only by phrases such as ‘said one art-critic

friend’ or ‘an upper-crust British architect’

or ‘a hot-shot young writer’ or ‘one posh

collector’. This is unforgivable, and casts

a shadow over the whole enterprise.

It seems that Gopnik never met Warhol.

His task might have been easier if he had.

He would have ‘got it’ at once and experi-

enced Warhol whole. Instead of viewing

these contradictions as varieties of moral

failure, he would have understood that they

were precipitated by Warhol’s straight-

forwardness. Only a less courageous, more

considered person could be consistent. Like

all great originals, Warhol did not need per-

mission to act. He could be dishonest but

never deceitful.

Gopnik doesn’t love Warhol. He’s alway-

sseeming to be giving him marks out of ten,

one minute comparing him with Picasso or

that was triple-locked, with an anxious artist

hiding inside. But it wasn’t remotely like that.

I just rang up, turned up and started talk-

ing to Warhol, and grasped immediately the

key to his greatness — an alert but gentle

largeness of soul which freed up everything

around him: all was work, all was art, yet

all was artlessness. He was the only person

I met in New York who was completely nat-

ural and not pushing an angle.

Warhol was the first truly Ameri-

can artist, the first who didn’t need

validation from Europe, the first of consum-

erism, the media and technology. He revo-

lutionised subject matter, technique, colour,

photography. He also invented slow cinema,

happenings, installations; pulled rock music

into the avant garde via the Velvet Under-

ground and created modern lifestyle journal-

ism with Interview magazine. He made being

straight and sober a bore from which it never

recovered. He recorded everything and kept

everything. He died before the digital age,

but he’d already sussed its behaviour. We all

live in Andy’s world now.

Gopnik’s long biography is much needed

— and it’s not long enough. The text is quite

a roller-coaster, as the author attempts to

resolve what he sees as the artist’s contradic-

tions, something which Warhol himself never

bothered about. At his revolutionary height

in the 1960s, when he ruptured art and soci-

ety through the astonishing liberties taken

by his paintings, films and superstars at the

Silver Factory, Warhol went home at night to

Warhol was the first truly American artist —

the first of consumerism, the media and technology

ALAMY

There are many conflicting views

of Warhol’s character: he was cold,

kind, witty, dumb, knowing, naive

Books_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 36 25/02/2020 14:39