WARHOL BLAKE GOPNIK
NEW BIOGRAPHY ON ARTIST STARTS WITH HIS NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
At age 39, Andy Warhol cheated death because a highly trained Italian-American surgeon saved his life.
On June 3, 1968, Warhol lay on a blood-soaked gurney in New York’s Columbus Hospital after Valerie Solanas shot the artist in Manhattan’s Union Square. To the rescue came Dr. Giuseppe Rossi, skilled in open-heart surgery and treating gunshot wounds.
“He thought Warhol was a tramp from Union Square,” said Blake Gopnik, author of “Warhol” (Ecco, $45), a new biography published in April.
A former art critic for the Washington Post, Mr. Gopnik will give a free virtual talk about the book at 7 p.m. Friday. The talk, held on YouTube, is free but registration is required at www.warhol.org. The virtual talk, which was prerecorded, is presented by The Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures. At 7:45 p.m., Mr. Gopnik will host a Q&A session via Twitter. To participate, tweet him at @BlakeGopnik with your question and #warholQandA.
Mr. Gopnik, who lives in New York City, devoted seven years to the biography, including long days in the archives of the Warhol museum on the North Side.
The book opens with a vivid account of how Dr. Rossi pulled Warhol back from the brink of death. Seven years ago, Mr. Gopnik listened as Dr. John Ryan, a retired Seattle surgeon and medical historian, interviewed Dr. Rossi.
“They went through every cut and stitch that was made in that five-hour operation. I decided that had to be the opening of my book,” Mr. Gopnik said.
Had Warhol died in 1968, “we never would have had Interview Magazine, his work in TV, his Rorschach, his Last Suppers or his camouflage paintings,” the author said. “We would have been stuck with Warhol the Pop artist.”
After Warhol recovered, he sent $1,000 to Dr. Rossi but the check bounced, Mr. Gopnik said. The surgeon’s office kept billing the artist, to no avail. One day, instead of a check, seven Marilyn Monroe artworks and some of the artist’s Campbell’s Soup cans were delivered to Dr. Rossi’s New York City apartment.
“When he first received them, he really didn’t want them,” Mr. Gopnik said.
Later, Dr. Rossi hung the Marilyns and he and and his famous patient, both born in 1928, became friendly.
As a boy, Warhol attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Greenfield. Some historians have suggested that the glowing gold background in his Marilyn Monroe artworks was influenced by the gold ground paintings that can be seen today on the church’s iconostas, a giant altar screen. But archival pictures show that the altar screen was installed well after Warhol left Pittsburgh in 1949. During Warhol’s youth, the church exhibited Italian Renaissance-style artwork, not the classic Byzantine gold ground icons, Mr. Gopnik said.
Warhol attended Saturday morning art classes at Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland. The author traces the artist’s interest in icons and gold backgrounds to an exhibition of Russian icons that Warhol likely saw at the museum in 1944.
“That’s what would have wowed him and impressed him,” Mr. Gopnik said.