Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol 1928-87, American artist and filmmaker, b. Pittsburgh as Andrew Warhola. The leading exponent of the pop art movement and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th cent., Warhol concentrated on the surface of things, choosing his imagery from the world of commonplace objects such as dollar bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes. He is variously credited with ridiculing and celebrating American middle-class values by erasing the distinction between popular and high culture. Monotony and repetition became the hallmarks of his multi-image, mass-produced silk-screen paintings: for many of these, such as the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, he employed newspaper photographs. He and his assistants worked out of a large New York studio dubbed the "Factory." In the mid-1960s Warhol began making films, suppressing the personal element in marathon essays on boredom. In The Chelsea Girls (1966), a seven-hour voyeuristic look into hotel rooms, he used projection techniques that constituted a startling divergence from established methods. Among his later films are Trash (1971) and L'Amour (1973). With Paul Morrissey, Warhol also made the films Frankenstein and Dracula (both: 1974). In 1973, Warhol launched the magazine Interview, a publication centered upon his fascination with the cult of the celebrity. He died from complications following surgery. The Andy Warhol Museum, which exhibits many of his works, opened in Pittsburgh in 1994.

Bibliography: See his autobiographies (1969 and 1971); K. Goldsmith, ed., I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-1987 (2004); C. Ratcliff, Andy Warhol (1983); D. Bourdon, Warhol (1989); V. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol (1989); W. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (2001); S. Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (2004).

Warhol, Andy (1928–1987), artist.Born Andrew Warhola in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Warhol earned a B.A. in pictorial design at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Technology and became a commercial artist in New York City. He designed book jackets, magazine illustrations, greeting cards, and award‐winning shoe advertisements. In 1962 he created his first silk‐screen paintings of mechanically processed subject matter from newspapers and pulp tabloids. These ranged from serial images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell Soup cans to contiguous repetitions of body‐strewn car wrecks. His choice of synthetic polymer paint for these canvases enhanced their reference to pop art's mass‐media sources. Warhol's calculated quest of celebrity peaked in the mid‐1960s. His Forty‐seventh Street studio, painted silver from floor to ceiling and dubbed the Factory, became the most notorious art‐world hot spot for camp fashion, underground film, rock music, hallucinatory drug culture, self‐dramatization, and multimedia spectacles. His films, a form of pop phenomenalism, explored “what things really are” by featuring such subjects as six hours of a man sleeping, eight hours of the Empire State Building, and shorter reels of various sex acts.

After his near‐fatal 1968 shooting by a woman who wanted him to produce a pornographic film she had written, Warhol recovered to start a superstar magazine, Interview. He also produced silk‐screen portraits of celebrities, including Mao Tse‐tung. Debate over whether Warhol's art should be viewed as cool detachment or as critical commentary extended his celebrity well beyond his often‐quoted wish of fifteen minutes of fame for everyone. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh displays many of his works.
See also Consumer Culture; Painting: Since 1945; Popular Culture; Postmodernism.

Bibliography

Andy Warhol , The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again), 1975.
Carter Ratcliff , Andy Warhol, 1983.

James M. Dennis