What They Think You Are

In November 1966, Andy Warhol attended Truman Capote’s legendary Black and White Ball, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. He wore black tie, as the invitation requested, but he neglected an essential item. Though he left home in “some kind of electrified cow’s head,” a nod to his Castelli wallpaper, he arrived at the masquerade without a mask. As Blake Gopnik’s meticulous and compelling new biography shows, however, Warhol didn’t need one to be disguised.

Warhol was a fascinating mess of self-­creation, as contrived as any of the elaborate confections worn by the hundreds of socialites at the Plaza that evening. In a way, his exposed face let people know that wearing a mask was redundant. As Gopnik suggests, this kind of observation, which many made at the time, is both overly simplistic and accurate. “The primary creation of Andy Warhol is Andy Warhol himself” begins to feel like an “empty cliché,” he writes. “Yet that conceit can’t quite count as a cliché, because it...