ANDY WARHOL'S BRAIN

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.