Warhol, Andy

Warhol, Andy (1928–1987). American painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman, film-maker, writer, and collector, one of the most famous and controversial artists of the 20th century. He was born in Pittsburgh to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents; his surname was originally Warhola. After studying painting and design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, 1945–9, he settled in New York. In the 1950s he was enormously successful as a commercial artist (specializing in shoe advertisements); he twice won the Art Directors' Club Medal (1952 and 1957) and by 1956 he was earning $100,000 a year. At the same time he was exhibiting drawings (to little critical attention) and he published six books of reproductions of them between 1954 and 1959.

In 1960 Warhol began making paintings based on mass-produced images such as newspaper advertisements and comic strips, then in 1962—at the suggestion of a friend—he started using dollar bills and Campbell's soup cans as his subjects. At first he painted these freehand, but he quickly switched to the screenprint process. The soup can pictures were first exhibited in the summer of 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, then in autumn of the same year at the Stable Gallery, New York. The second exhibition was a sensational success and Warhol soon became the most famous and controversial figure in American Pop art. In the same vein as his soup cans he did pictures of Coca-Cola bottles and made equally banal sculptures of Brillo soap pad boxes and similar cartons. He also embarked on a lengthy series of pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and other celebrities. Similar in method but different in effect were his pictures of disasters such as car crashes and views of the electric chair. Whatever the subject in his pictures, he often made use of rows of repeated images. The screenprinting process allowed infinite replication, and he was opposed to the idea of a work of art as a piece of craftsmanship, hand-made and expressing the personality of the artist: ‘I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine.’ In keeping with this outlook he used clippings of ‘dehumanized’ illustrations from the mass media as his sources, turned out his works like a manufacturer, and called his studio ‘The Factory'. There he was surrounded by a crowd of helpers and hangers-on, described by Robert Hughes as ‘cultural space-debris, drifting fragments from a variety of sixties subcultures'. Warhol liked to give the impression that he took a paternal interest in his followers, but Eric Shanes (Warhol, 1991) writes that ‘Just how cynical he could be in his dealings with his entourage is demonstrated by an incident that occurred in October 1964 when one of his hangers-on, Freddie Herko, committed suicide by jumping from a fifth-floor window in Greenwich Village while high on LSD: Warhol was heard to complain repeatedly that Herko should have forewarned him so that he could have filmed his death'.

In 1965 Warhol announced his retirement as an artist to devote himself to films and to managing the rock group The Velvet Underground, but in fact he never gave up painting and in the 1970s and 1980s he made an enormous amount of money churning out commissioned portraits of wealthy patrons; in 1986 the Christmas catalogue for the Neiman-Marcus department stores advertised a portrait session with him for $35,000 (‘Become a legend with Andy Warhol'). In the 1980s he sometimes collaborated with other painters, including the Graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and LeRoi Neiman (1927– ), who is best-known for his illustrations in Playboy magazine.

As a film-maker, Warhol became perhaps the only ‘underground’ director to be well-known to the general public. His first films were silent and virtually completely static: Sleep (1963)—a man sleeping for six hours; and Empire (1964)—the Empire State Building seen from one viewpoint for eight hours: ‘I like boring things.’ Later films, such as the two-screen Chelsea Girls (1966), gained widespread attention because of their voyeuristic concentration on sex. In 1968 Warhol was shot and severely wounded by a bit-part player in one of his films, a member of SCUM (The Society for Cutting Up Men), an incident that added to his legendary status. By this time he was perhaps already more famous for his celebrity-courting, partying lifestyle and deliberately bland persona than for his art; indeed, it could be argued that his advertising skills were nowhere more brilliantly deployed than in promoting himself.

In purely financial terms his success in selfpromotion was prodigious. At his death (following a routine gall bladder operation) he left a fortune estimated at $100,000,000, most of which went to create an arts charity, the Andy Warhol Foundation. His status as an artist, however, is controversial. Even his most fervent admirers tend to admit that he added little to his achievement as a painter after the mid-1960s, but large claims are sometimes made for his earlier works. Eric Shanes, for example, writes: ‘Through pioneering a variety of techniques, but principally the visual isolation of imagery, its repetition and similarity to printed images, and the use of garish colour to denote the visual garishness that is often encountered in mass culture, Andy Warhol threw much direct or indirect light upon modern anomie or alienated world-weariness, nihilism, materialism, political manipulation, economic exploitation, conspicuous exploitation, media hero-worship, and the creation of artificially-induced needs and aspirations. Moreover, in his best paintings and prints he was a very fine creator of images, with a superb colour sense and a brilliant feel for the visual rhythm of a picture resulting from his intense awareness of the pictorial potentialities of abstract forms.’ Bernard Levin, however, probably speaks for many in describing Warhol as ‘that one-man demonstration of the triumph of publicity over art'.

Warhol published a celebrity magazine called Interview, and several books appeared under his name, some genuinely written by him, others put together from tapes. They include ‘a’ A Novel (1968) and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975). The Diaries of Andy Warhol appeared posthumously in 1989. His extensive collection of art and artefacts (including much jewellery but comparatively few paintings) was auctioned at Sotheby's, New York, in 1988; the catalogue extended to six volumes. In 1994 a museum dedicated to his work opened in his home town of Pittsburgh, and the Warhol Foundation has helped to build a museum of modern art at Medzilaborce in Slovakia, near to the village of Mikova, where his parents once lived.