A shrewd and captivating journey into Warhol’s art, combining psychological insights with evocative prose.
The celebrated pop artist Andy Warhol was a textbook example of how the mind can turn suffering into creative gold, according to this biographical meditation.
Romero, a psychiatrist and artist who knew Warhol personally, traces links between the artist’s artworks—including his carefully crafted public image—and his experiences of illness, social exclusion, and bereavement. These included serious childhood bouts of rheumatic fever and Sydenham chorea, also known as St. Vitus’ Dance, which had lasting physical and neurological effects on the artist, Romero contends; they included a flattened affect and verbal inexpressiveness, which he repurposed as an aloof, diffident, “cool” persona. Warhol’s father’s death in 1942 caused the teenager to hide under his bed for three days; however, Romero asserts, it also kindled an obsession with mortality that informed some of Warhol’s best-known paintings. His unhappiness about his physical appearance made him fixate on Hollywood-style beauty and glamour, which infused iconic paintings of James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe, and his early career as an advertising illustrator provoked disdain from the Abstract Expressionist elite, but it led the artist to an egalitarian pop art philosophy that erased the gap separating Campbell’s soup cans from fine art. And although Warhol’s intense shyness left him virtually friendless for much of his life, the author says, it also fueled a drive to become so famous that the world would seek him out, as when his Factory studio became the center of 1960s avant-garde New York. Romero fits these observations into a therapeutic framework that he calls Logosoma Brain Training, which combines ideas about the brain’s response to stress and its generation of creative thought patterns with evolutionary theory and Buddhist principles of nonattachment and mindfulness.
Romero’s nuanced portrait of Warhol teases out the complexities of his character, highlighting his agitation and insecurity—one vignette has him “sobbing hysterically” when a lover brought another man to their hotel room—and his veneer of Zenlike serenity: “The more you look at the same exact thing,” he said of his repetitive imagery, “the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” The book’s analysis of Warhol’s contradictory personality conveys psychiatric tropes in colorful text with punchy metaphors: “Ondine, Factory superstar, coined a nickname for Andy—Drella, a portmanteau of Dracula and Cinderella. It reflects a poetic assessment of Warhol as a vampire seeking virgin blood while being disguised as a Cinderella-like virgin himself.” The author’s explorations of Warhol’s art are equally deft and open to the multiplicity of meanings in deceptively simple works: “What did Andy Warhol see when he looked at a can of Campbell’s soup? He saw lunch. He saw childhood memories with his mother….He saw the factories of mass production. He saw art. A masterpiece of human ingenuity, creativity, truth, beauty, and goodness.” Well-chosen illustrations, including reproductions of some of the artist’s works, as well as candid images of the artist by various photographers lend visual resonance to Romero’s commentary.
A shrewd and captivating journey into Warhol’s art, combining psychological insights with evocative prose.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781943876396
Page Count: 256
Publisher: G Editions LLC
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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