I’d like to start off this essay by expressing some personal opinions about the subject I’ve chosen, and also provide some background information, essential to a better understanding of the artist I have chosen, the era and movement he belonged to, and the style of art he produced. This world renowned artist I believe is the first artist that comes to mind when people hear the word “Pop art”. This man is Andy Warhol, one of the most famous modern artists of the 20th Century. This American painter, graphic artist, film maker, and writer, born to Czech immigrant parents, became enormously successful as a commercial rtist.
By 1956 he was earning $100. 000 a year, and Warhol loved money. We see this in some of the things he said, for example, **”Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art of all”. He began making most of his money through making paintings based on mass-produced images pulled out of mass media of the day. Warhol soon became the most famous, and in my opinion most controversial, figure in American Pop art. The process of silkscreen allowed him to create infinite replication, and this, I think, was part of his slightly eccentric personality, *”I want everybody to think alike.
I think everybody should be a machine”. He used clippings of “dehumanized” illustrations from the mass media as his source of inspiration. He churned out his work like a production line, and called his studio “The Factory”. In purely financial terms, because of his relentless self-promotion, he became a legend. Financing his own films, books and the well-known band “The Velvet Underground”, he was generous and encouraged new talent. Even after his death he made sure that this encouragement would carry on.
He left a fortune estimated at $100. 00. 000, most of which went to create an arts charity, the Andy Warhol Foundation. His status as an artist, as I mentioned, still remains controversial. Even his most fervent admirers, including myself, tend to admit that be added little to his achievement as a painter after the mid-60’s. I could perhaps say Warhol became more famous for his celebrity- courting lifestyle and deliberately bland persona than for his art. But I could also argue that his advertising skills were nowhere more brilliantly deployed than in promoting himself.
I could say that Warhol and his lifestyle were the embodiment of sorts, of the American Pop culture of his day, but that would be incorrect because of the fact that there are many acets to Pop art that no individual could possibly fit them all. The only way I believe that any one can come close to defining Andy Warhol is by using one of his own quotes, *”If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am, there’s nothing behind it”. Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Born Andrew Warhola in 1928, in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia.
His father, Andrei Warhola moved to the United States in order to avoid conscription after being married to Andy’s mother, Julia Zavacky Warhola, for three years. In 1921, after a separation of many years, Julia rejoined her husband in America. Andy Warhol was the youngest of their three sons and was raised as a Catholic. Andrei travelled much on business trips and died when Warhol was only 13. According to Warhol’s mother, Julia, he had drunk poisoned water. At school, most of his friends were girls. Margie Girman, one of his best friends, and Andy attended movies together.
From an early age Warhol was interested in the more glamorous aspects of American life. He loved to collect the eight-by-ten inch autographed pictures that the ushers handed ut after shows that began his collector’s mania. During his childhood, he was afflicted with chorea, a serious disorder of the central nervous system. As a result, he was very timid at school because of the shaking caused by his disorder. He also had a blotchy skin, and was taunted by his schoolmates. He became extremely attached to his mother, who nursed him back to health.
While he lived in Pittsburgh, Andy took advantage of the art classes both at his school, Schenley High School, and the ones offered at the nearby Carnegie Museum. He attended the prestigious Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Melon University, where he studied pictorial design and art history, sociology and psychology. He struggled with most of his classes, especially his Thought and Expression class. He had never learnt English well, so he relied on his friends to translate his thoughts into coherent essays, but still failed the class.
Even in his art classes, Andy caused trouble when he refused to follow directions and so Carnegie Tech dropped Andy at the end of his freshman year to make room for returning veterans. A few teachers defended him, and he was given the option to be considered for readmission. The sketches he drew that summer were so outstanding that the school not only readmitted him, but also awarded him the forty-dollar Lessier Prize. He graduated with a major in pictorial design and moved to New York City in June 1949 with college friend Philip Pearlstein, to find work as commercial artists.
On only his second day in New York, Andy found work at a glamour magazine, drawing advertisements for I. Miller Shoe Company, for which he won a number of awards. He found more work arranging window displays for Bonwit Teller and drawing more advertisements for magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, book jackets and holiday greeting cards. During his first 10 years in New York he worked as a commercial artist. The film director Emile de Antonio encouraged him to start as a free artist – Antonio considered commercial art real art and he also helped such painters as Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg.
The process of doing work in commercial art was machine-like, but the whole commercial attitude still had feeling to it. Warhol found that, in working as a commercial artist, he has to be creative and original, and also had to satisfy those who were paying him. While living in New York, Andy made two significant changes to his persona: He dropped the ‘a’ from his last name and started wearing a wig, slightly askew. Now the silver-haired Andy Warhol started to see success. His first show, called “15 Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote”, opened, and this saw his income increase to twenty-five thousand dollars over six months.
After this success in commercial art, he carried the same theme of material goods and incorporated them into his own Pop art. Warhol held shows of his drawings in New York galleries and published six books of reproductions of thematic drawings. Although the books were printed in limited editions, the idea aped that of commercial art, and made his own art less exclusive, less unique and more accessible to the masses of people who were interested in his work. He took his subject matter from the category of mass communication and produced paintings which looked bland and dispassionate.
In his quest for an art that could be machine- like, that would look as though no human had produced it, he also wanted to encourage the idea that anybody and everybody could and should be able to produce art – **”I think everybody should be a machine”, “I want to be like machine”, he announced, in memorable contrast to Jackson Pollock, the drip painter, who fifteen years before had declared that he wanted *”to be nature: a mediumistic force, unpredictable, various, and full of energy”. Like a number of other young artists, Warhol had ambivalent feelings about the dominant style of painting – Abstract Expressionism.
In large scale works, artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970) used abstract art to express their individuality in paint. Their art was totally removed from the day to day concerns of everyday life. Unlike them, Warhol was fascinated with American popular culture, with comics, films, television, newspapers, advertising, even packaging. He dedicated most of his time in the 60’s to his dream, finding a permanent studio, which he finally found in “The Factory” in 1963.
Warhol’s New York City art studio, ‘The Factory’, became a legendary hangout for artist, celebrities, and social dropouts. Among its glittering visitors were Bob Dylan, Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev, Mia Farrow, John Lennon, and its ‘regulars’ included Edie Sedgwick, Viva, and Lou Reed. The location of the studio was in the middle of the action – 47th Street and Third Avenue. Demonstrators could be seen on their way to the UN, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev went by, and the Pope rode by once on his way to St Patrick’s Cathedral.
It was a glamorous, chaotic experimental society where “superstars” hung out, and here Warhol came even closer to his wishes of working “like a machine” by producing over 2000 paintings in the time he was in his “factory”. However, Andy did do more than paint. He produced a number of films, starting in 1963. The earliest ones were an extremely experimental and novel concept, rather simple and dull in execution. As time wore on his films grew more sophisticated, with scripts and soundtracks, though they featured his friends and groupies from The Factory. Andy also produced the rock-and-roll music group “The Velvet Underground”.
He supplied the band with a place to rehearse, paid for their equipment, and gave them a chance to glean some of Andy’s popularity. Music by The Velvet Underground still enjoys underground popularity, through covers by modern artists. The intense, dramatic life at The Factory could not continue without glitches. One of the most serious was the near fatal shooting in June 1968. Valerie Solanas, one-time Factory groupie and radical former/sole member of S. C. U. M (Society for Cutting Up Men), walked into the Factory and shot Andy. He spent nearly two months recovering.
Upon returning to the art world in the 70’s and 80’s, Andy’s popularity as a media icon soared. He used his fame as a way of helping young artists, mainly through his “Factory”. After the shooting, his paintings also began to reflect a change to more abstract-expressionistic paintings. He completed the “Skulls”, and “Hammer”, and “Sickle” series and experimented with the effects of urinating on canvases in the Oxidation series during this period. In 1987, Andy entered into a hospital under a false name for routine gall bladder surgery. He was so afraid of hospitals that he waited until the pain was unbearable before seeking help.
The surgery went without complications, but he died the following day. In summary, Andy Warhol enjoyed success almost instantly after leaving university which some people believed he would never pass, and at one point almost didn’t. He crossed over the two understandings of commercial art and fine art. He blurred the boundaries with his radical style which incorporated mass-media and mass- roduction, trade-marks of commercial art and made them part of a brand of Pop art accessible to everyone, not just exclusive one-off, gallery pieces like those of Pollock and Rothko.
His Work, His earliest were simple line drawings, images of cats – the subject inherited from his mother. Warhol published a number of promotional books as gifts for potential clients, including “Love is a Pink Cake” and “A la Recherche du Shoe Perd”. Warhol employed photographic images as his source material and used techniques derived from the commercial art industry such as photo-static machines. Warhol’s illustrations for the I. Miller Shoe company began to appear on a weekly basis in the “New York Times”.
His slightly homoerotic drawings were exhibited in New York, after that they gained a certain popularity. Some of the drawings were in ballpoint pen but for most, Warhol used a monotype process, making an initial sketch in ink and then pressed the wet drawing onto absorbent paper to create the finished illustration. In the 1950’s Warhol became known as a leading commercial illustrator and established “Andy Warhol Enterprises Inc. “, and through this enterprise he created such images as “Coke Bottles”, “Campbell’s Soup Cans”, comic ook characters and the “Do it yourself” paintings.
Warhol’s first pop paintings had a drippy abstract-expressionist style. It was only when he started painting things in a two-dimensional way, flat, dead-on, that he found his true style. Andy Warhol drew on his experience as a commercial artist to produce his famous series of prints of the well-known Campbell’s soup cans. In its original form, the soup cans were presented as a seemingly endless repetition of the same image, reminding us of the mechanical production lines, or supermarket shelves where such images are found in our everyday lives, in every part of the world.
He used the Coca- Cola bottle in basically the same way; he deliberately chose ordinary objects, or figures from the world of movies, as a way of showing the humdrum ordinariness and superficiality of modern life. But he particularly chose the Campbell’s soup brand, with its distinct red and white packaging, because as a child he ate Campbell’s soup everyday, **”used to drink it… same lunch every day for twenty years… the same thing over and over again… I liked the idea”, Warhol said.
He painted all thirty-two varieties individually and in groups, and also created a Campbell’s soup box. With the Coca-Cola bottles, he took yet another symbol of American consumerism and in post-war years they also became symbols of the American virtues of liberty and freedom. Advertising at the time concentrated on the uniqueness of the product, but Warhol seemed to draw attention not to the uniqueness of the coke bottle, but to its very pervasiveness. Warhol understood the language and power of advertising and the way popular culture worked, and aspects of the mass-media.
He understood the effects that they could have on the masses, the underlying messages that each and every advert for a large consumer product carried. He looked at many advertising schemes, deciphered them and created a new message, sometimes the complete opposite of what most companies had intended for their product. Warhol was a commercial genius when it came to symbolism and making it more understandable. In the 1960’s Warhol began to produce images that were linked to death, destruction, suicide and disaster seeming to reflect the changing attitudes and growing concerns of the American public.
In a 1963 interview, Andy Warhol admitted that everything he did revolved around death. Since the first painting in his Disaster series featuring the front page of the New York Mirror from 4th June 1962 with the screamer “129 Die in Jet! ” Warhol’s fascination with death, and how it was reported in the media, grew to epic proportions. His obsession with reported death evolved in his Disaster series, from the electric chairs taken from the press photographs he avidly collected, to car crashes and suicides lifted from the newspapers.
He took images of everyday people in extraordinary circumstances that had been fed to the general public by the press: an ambulance that had crashed, a woman who had jumped off a building or a man impaled on a telegraph pole all became the subject of his art. He laconically commented on the sensationalism of death in the media – that it made good news, and therefore sold papers and boosted ratings. Some of the more well-known pieces in the Disaster series are: -The Tunafish Disaster.
This outlined the deaths of several people from eating contaminated tuna fish. Five Deaths. Warhol used photographs of victims of a horrific car accident. -Jackie. This is a screen-print that was taken from a photograph in Life magazine of Jackie Kennedy, just after the death of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. -Marilyn Monroe. Warhol became interested in Monroe after her suicide” and used film still photographs as the basis for his images, and showing Marilyn at the height of her power. -The Electric Chair. These images represent a more sinister part of the Disaster series, using the media concern about the death penalty.
The large vacant chamber has an eerie and horrific feeling to it, re-enforced by the sign on the wall indicating a request for “Silence”. In 1963 Warhol went into filmmaking, producing more than 80 films. Typical examples of his early films are “Sleep” (1963), in which the camera remained fixed on a man sleeping for the duration of eight hours, and Empire” (1965), which consisted of a seemingly endless shot of the Empire State Building. In “Tub Girls”, the girls had to take baths with other people in tubs.
His films, exhibited in art theatres, helped accelerate the trend toward legitimizing explicit sex on the American screen. In 1969 Warhol founded the “Interview” magazine – first called “inter/VIEW” – and remained a powerful pop culture figure into the 1980s. Bob Colacello, the editor of “Interview” left the magazine in 1983 and later portrayed Warhol in his book “Holy Terror” (1990). Colacello saw Warhol as an eccentric illionaire, gossiper, sharp businessman, shopper, and *”a closet control freak, who, deviously pretended he didn’t know what was going on”.
In the 1970’s Andy Warhol made a comeback after being shot and almost killed and was out of the art scene for many months. His comeback was marked by his large scale portraits of Chairman Mao (Mao Tse-tung, 1893- 1976). Warhol saw Mao as the ultimate celebrity, and his image was spread throughout China and was a symbol of Communism in the west. Warhol then later turned his attention to another of America’s adversaries and another symbol of Communism, the Soviet Union, in a series of still-lives, “Still Life (Hammer and Sickle)”, seen as photographed objects instead of stylized symbols.
Warhol later continued with his previous obsession with death in his Skull series. The skull is a traditional symbol, but the bright colours used don’t seem to sit right with the subject matter of death. Warhol created images that play on contemporary fears and revived old ones. In the late 70’s, Warhol embarked upon an exploration of abstract imagery. For his “Oxidations” of 1978, commonly referred to as “Piss paintings”, Warhol asked people visiting his studio to urinate on canvases that were coated in copper-metallic pigment.
Another monumental series by Warhol in the 70’s was that of the “Shadows”, a series of 102 silk-screened abstract paintings that Warhol himself designated them as **”One Painting… many parts”. In the 1980’s, Warhol continued to be an important part of the art world. He collaborated with a number of young artists, and he returned to some of the themes which had concerned him in the 1960’s. In “Myths” he returns to the comic strip characters which he had first painted in the early 60’s.
The title suggests something more profound than it really is, but that is Warhol’s style, to trivialize subjects. The “Guns” series, which at one level deals with the theme of death, is also trivialized through its endless comic-like repetition. His last great work – “The Last Supper”, is a series of crude reproductions of Leonardo’s masterpiece. At the time, Warhol was working with restorations. He used cheap reproductions of the painting as his source. All this confronts the preciousness of Leonardo’s original work.
Even the greatest historical works of art no longer retain their uniqueness or mystique. They are lowered and become no greater than the image of the coke bottle or soup can after being in Warhol’s hands and being subjected to mass reproduction. His Legacy, Although Andy Warhol died in 1987, his vision carries on; he remains the most contemporary of artists. Warhol’s apparently vacant gaze set upon what he called **”all the great modern things”, soup cans, Marilyn, car crashes, still made his paintings, films and photographs utterly provocative.
Other pop artists of the 60’s, such as Roy Lichtenstein (1923- 1997), painter of dot-screened comic book images; demonstrated painterly sensibilities that belied their fascination with consumer culture. Today it is easy to see how much subsequent art is indebted to Warhol. From Warhol laying out silkscreen images on the floor to Carl Andre arranging bricks is a logical development, except Warhol is funnier and his relationship to contemporary production of images as well as things more astute is unique in the way he can and does mock certain subjects, objects and aspects of modern life.
You can see him as a vacuous stargazer, a business artist, the first post-modernist, a dark social satirist, a tragedian; all these things are true. But what runs through his work is an aesthetic governed by its relationship with photography. Looking at his paintings, films, even Polaroid’s, is like taking out an old photo album nd being pulled up by images that at the time seemed insignificant.
Some years after his death, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in Andy’s hometown, Pittsburgh, as “the first museum devoted entirely to the work of an American artist in the postwar generation”. The museum fosters an appreciation of Andy’s work not only by displaying his art, but also by showcasing rising performing talent, guiding visitors through interpreting his art, and teaching students to make silk-screen art like his. The fame of this modern art innovator has certainly lived on past his fifteen minutes of fame.
