Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties.

Mitzel, John

by Steven Watson Pantheon. 512 pp., $27.50

Steven Watson is a cultural historian whose numerous books focus on the modernist impulse and its manifestations in 20th-century America. His first book, Strange Bedfellows, explored the introduction of artistic modernism in the early years of the 20th century. He's written books on the Harlem Renaissance and the birth of the Beats. His book on Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein and the debut of Four Saints In Three Acts is a wonderful document of social history. Watson's latest is Factory Made. True, there are already a lot of books about Andy Warhol, but the Factory years certainly fit in with Watson's purview. Did modernism end in the 60's? Andy famously got free labor out of some of his Factory workers--but there were lots of disturbed young-uns in the mix. Watson covers the years from 1964 to 1968 at the Silver Factory, and we meet the usual suspects: Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgewick, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Billy Name, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin, Ultra Violet, and Viva. Warhol got very famous as an artist in these years, and his tide lifted a lot of boats. Much of his career was a big "fuck you" to the art world, but that was the temper of the times, and his band of refugees at the Factory was his antidote to the official art scene of his earlier years. Factory Made is chock-full of black-and-white photos, including one of Andy at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, after which the world famously ended, at least as some people knew it.