Although he never studied at the Royal College of Art, Antony Donaldson's friendships with RCA students Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips put him firmly in the vanguard of the Pop Art movement in London in the 1960s. Born in 1939, Donaldson was chosen in 1964 for the landmark New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery which included Allen Jones and David Hockney and he became the first Pop Artist to sell his work to the Tate. Like Hockney, Donaldson dreamed of a quiet and relaxed life in southern California and moved to Los Angeles between 1966 and 1968, where he painted daringly simple compositions using saturated colour and sensual forms. In later years Donaldson took up sculpture in a variety of media; his most famous piece is the giant Buddha-like head of Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Suspense, in the courtyard of the Gainsborough Film Studios in London. This monograph includes an illustrated chronology, an exhibition checklist and a bibliography

"Superb...Gopnik persuasively assembles his case over the course of this mesmerising book, which is as much art history and philosophy as it is biography" Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian When critics attacked Andy Warhol's Marilyn paintings as shallow, the Pop artist was happy to present himself as shallower still: He claimed that he silkscreened to avoid the hard work of painting, although he was actually a meticulous workaholic; in interviews he presented himself as a silly naif when in private he was the canniest of sophisticates. Blake Gopnik's definitive biography digs deep into the contradictions and radical genius that led Andy Warhol to revolutionise our cultural world. Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol's surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist's path from his origins as the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants in 1930s Pittsburgh, through his early success as a commercial illustrator and his groundbreaking pivot into fine art, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity of the '70s and '80s, as he reflected and responded to the changing dynamics of commerce and culture. Warhol sought out all the most glamorous figures of his times - Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, the Barons de Rothschild - despite being burdened with an almost crippling shyness. Behind the public glitter of the artist's Factory, with its superstars, drag queens and socialites, there was a man who lived with his mother for much of his life and guarded the privacy of his home. He overcame the vicious homophobia of his youth to become a symbol of gay achievement, while always seeking the pleasures of traditional romance and coupledom. (Warhol explodes the myth of his asexuality.) Filled with new insights into the artist's work and personality, Warhol asks: Was he a joke or a genius, a radical or a social climber? As Warhol himself would have answered: Yes.