Critic seeks to prove art legit Warhol
Art-world chicanery meets true crime in Richard Dorment’s breezy, absorbing “Warhol After Warhol.”
That title has a double meaning. It refers to the complicated estate that pop artist Andy Warhol left when he died in 1987, one valued in the tens of millions. It also hints that, because of his working methods (especially silk screening) and his casual approach to pieces that were attributed to him, new works often pop up and need to be authenticated, long after Warhol’s death.
British art critic Richard Dorment became involved in the latter after Joe Simon approached him when two artworks he believed to be legit were disavowed by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. One was fake. But another, from a ’60s series called “Red Self-Portraits,” seemed real. So why had the authentication board rejected it, defacing it in the process?
You don’t need to care about the snooty art world to be interested in Dorment’s investigation, which takes years and leads to hobnobbing with a member of Duran Duran, being drawn into Mick Jagger’s orbit, encounters with the FBI and (he believes) his phone being tapped.
Beginning in 2003 and extending over more than a decade, Dorment learns a lot about the way Warhol’s estate has been managed and why those who profit from it might want to reduce the number of official works by Warhol.
As the erudite writer becomes more involved in Simon’s quest, he lifts a rock off wormy dealings in the art world. Dorment gets inadvertent help from the loud-mouthed president of the Andy Warhol Foundation and from documents accidentally given to him by Simon’s foes at the authentication board, a plot twist that’s right out of a courtroom melodrama.
In the end, Simon racks up huge legal bills in an attempt to prove his piece’s authenticity, and we learn that the world of art and beauty is a grubby, slimy place. — Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Jill Burke’s sprightly cultural history “How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity” is a window on the lot of women in early modern Europe. Also, a gentle reminder that, as complicated as things are for women of the TikTok generation, it’s nothing like the fraught terrain confronting the Renaissance woman, who was subject to perilously exacting — and contradictory — standards of attractiveness and modesty.
Against the injunctions of the male gaze — set out in disapproving tracts and dialogues — Burke marshals the advice contained in books like Giovanni Marinello’s “The Ornaments of Ladies” or the earliest known printed book of beauty tips. Then Burke introduces us to women who, through luck and force of will were able to parlay their talents, skills and, inevitably, beauty into successes as painters, writers, performers and courtesans.
Among these women the perennial dilemma emerges: Rebel against the physical ideals, imposed upon the female sex by men and society, or embrace the tools of beauty and sexuality as a means to power: Betty Friedan versus the Cosmo Girl, Renaissance edition.
Of course, there is no answer. And in a world where violence against women is both endemic and sanctioned, how much agency can a woman, however lucky or gifted, really have? Burke celebrates the female artists and intellectuals, but there is no avoiding the fact that they were only as successful as male society allowed.
Women of the 15th and 16th centuries may have been accomplished and enterprising, but with one accusation of witchery they could be undone.
If you were wondering how to be a Renaissance woman, the answer, Burke’s book perhaps inadvertently tells you, is: Just don’t. — Ellen Akins, Minneapolis Star Tribune