Citizen Warhol
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More than any other figure throughout art's long history, Andy Warhol has attracted fans, aficionados, enthusiasts, experts, critics, art historians, philosophers and many thoughtful others who have not just reported on the details of his life's work but have struggled to make sense of it as an enigma. Citizen Warhol carries this inquiry forward by unpacking the lasting effects of Warhol's most deep-seated influences - his Byzantine-rite religiosity and its relationship to the retinue of Roman Catholics that starred in his films and staffed his studio, his art training in an institutional crucible dominated by Andrew Carnegie's Gilded Age theory of art, his powerful identification with Shirley Temple's frolic in the adult world under the cover of childhood, his formative dalliance with the guilt-ridden sensibility of arch-decadent and Catholic convert Aubrey Beardsley, and his triumphs as a commercial artist working in a professional world still beholden to the Red Decade ideals of the 1930s as a 'cheaper Ben Shahn', the leading Social Realist artist.
Each of these underappreciated influences were fundamental to the life and legacy of the mature Warhol, an artist best understood as the Leonardo of our age who, more than any other, has given formative poetic expression to the epoch of the global consumer.
Blake Stimson is Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art history and author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (2006).