WARHOL, Andy

Nationality: American. Born: Andrew Warhola in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, 6 August 1928. Education: Studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, B.F.A., 1949. Career: Illustrator for Glamour Magazine (New York), 1949–50; commercial artist, New York, 1950–57; independent artist, New York, 1957 until his death in 1987; first silk-screen paintings, 1962; began making films, mainly with Paul Morrissey, a member of his "Factory," 1963; shot by former "Factory" regular Valerie Solanas, 1968; editor, Inter/View magazine, New York; made promo video for "Hello Again" by The Cars, 1984. Awards: 6th Film Culture Award, New York, 1964; Award, Los Angeles Film Festival, 1964. Died: Of cardiac arrest following routine gall bladder operation in New York, 22 February 1987.

Films as Director and Producer:

1963

Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of; Sleep; Kiss; AndyWarhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love; DanceMovie (Roller Skate); Salome and Delilah; Haircut; Blow Job

1964

Empire; Batman Dracula; The End of Dawn; Naomi andRufus Kiss; Henry Geldzahler; The Lester Persky Story (Soap Opera); Couch; Shoulder; Mario Banana; Harlot; Taylor Mead's Ass

1965

Thirteen Most Beautiful Women; Thirteen Most BeautifulBoys; Fifty Fantastics; Fifty Personalities; Ivy and John; Screen Test I; Screen Test II; The Life of Juanita Castro; Drunk; Suicide; Horse; Vinyl; Bitch; Poor Little Rich Girl; Face; Restaurant; Afternoon; Prison; Space; Outer andInner Space; Camp; Paul Swan; Hedy (Hedy the Shoplifteror The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl); The Closet; Lupe; MoreMilk, Evette

1966

Kitchen; My Hustler; Bufferin (Gerard Malanga Reads Poetry); Eating Too Fast; The Velvet Underground; Chelsea Girls

1967

* * * * (Four Stars) [parts of * * * * include InternationalVelvet; Alan and Dickin; Imitation of Christ; Coutroom; Gerard Has His Hair Removed with Nair; Katrina Dead; Sausalito; Alan and Apple; Group One; Sunset Beach onLong Island; High Ashbury; Tiger Morse]; I, a Man; BikeBoy; Nude Restaurant; The Loves of Ondine

1968

Lonesome Cowboys; Blue Movie (Fuck); Flesh (d Morrissey, pr Warhol)

1970

Trash (d Morrissey, pr Warhol)

1972

Women in Revolt (co-d with Morrissey); Heat (d Morrissey, pr Warhol)

1973

L'Amour (co-d, pr, co-sc with Morrissey)

1974

Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (d Morrissey, pr Warhol); AndyWarhol's Dracula (d Morrissey, pr Warhol)

1977

Andy Warhol's Bad (d Morrissey, pr Warhol)

Other Films

1986

Vamp (Wenk) (contributing artist)

Publications

By WARHOL: books—

Blue Movie, script, New York, 1970.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), New York, 1975.

The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, New York, 1989.

Andy Warhol: In His Own Words, London, 1991.

Angels, angels, angels, London, 1994.

Cats, cats, cats, London, 1994.

By WARHOL: articles—

Interview with David Ehrenstein, in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1966.

"Nothing to Lose," an interview with Gretchen Berg, in Cahiers duCinéma in English (New York), May 1967.

Numerous interviews conducted by Warhol, in Inter/View (New York).

Interview in The Film Director as Superstar, by Joseph Gelmis, Garden City, New York, 1970.

Interview with Tony Rayns, in Cinema (London), August 1970.

Interview with Ralph Pomeroy, in Afterimage (Rochester), Autumn 1970.

On WARHOL: books—

Coplans, John, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970.

Crone, Rainer, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970.

Gidal, Peter, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970.

Wilcox, John, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, New York, 1971.

Koch, Stephen, Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films, New York, 1973; revised edition, 1985.

Smith, Patrick S., Andy Warhol's Art and Films, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1986.

Bourdon, David, Warhol, 1989.

Finkelstein, Nat, Warhol: The Factory Years 1964–67, London, 1989.

Gidal, Peter, Materialist Film, London, 1989.

Guiles, Fred Lawrence, Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol, New York, 1989.

James, David E., Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, Princeton, New Jersey, 1989.

O'Pray, Michael, Andy Warhol: Film Factory, London, 1989.

Colacello, Bob, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, New York, 1990.

Koch, Stephen, Stargazer: The Life, World, and Films of AndyWarhol, New York, 1991.

Inboden, Gudrun, Andy Warhol: White Disaster I, 1963, Stuttgart, 1992.

Kurtz, Bruce D., ed., Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Walt Disney, Munich and London, 1992.

Geldzahler, Henry, Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Seventies andEighties, London, 1993.

Katz, Jonathan, Andy Warhol, New York, 1993.

Alexander, Paul, Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empireand the Race for Andy's Millions, New York, 1994.

Cagle, Van M., Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and AndyWarhol, Thousand Oaks, California, 1995.

Tillman, Lynne; photographs by Stephen Shore, The Velvet Years:Warhol's Factory, 1965–67, New York, 1995.

Suárez, Juan Antonio, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars:Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960sUnderground Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana, 1996.

Bockris, Victor, Warhol, New York, 1997.

Pratt, Alan R., editor, The Critical Response to Andy Warhol, Westport, Connecticut, 1997.

MacCabe, Colin, with Mark Francis and Peter Wollen, editors, Who IsAndy Warhol? London, 1997.

Dalton, David, Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964–1967, New York, 2000.

On WARHOL: articles—

Stoller, James, "Beyond Cinema: Notes on Some Films by Andy Warhol," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1966.

Tyler, Parker, "Dragtime and Drugtime: or Film à la Warhol," in Evergreen Review (New York), April 1967.

"Warhol," in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1967.

Lugg, Andrew, "On Andy Warhol," in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1967/68 and Spring 1968.

Rayns, Tony, "Andy Warhol's Films Inc.: Communication in Action," in Cinema (London), August 1970.

Heflin, Lee, "Notes on Seeing the Films of Andy Warhol," in Afterimage (Rochester), Autumn 1970.

Bourdon, David, "Warhol as Filmmaker," in Art in America (New York), May-June 1971.

Cipnic, D.J., "Andy Warhol: Iconographer," in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1972.

Larson, R., "A Retrospective Look at the Films of D. W. Griffith and Andy Warhol," in Film Journal (New York), Fall-Winter 1972.

James, David E., "The Producer as Author," in Wide Angle (Baltimore, Maryland), vol. 7, no. 3, 1985.

Cohn, L., obituary in Variety (New York), 25 February 1987.

Babitz, E., "The Soup Can as Big as the Ritz," in Movieline, November 1989.

Currie, C., "Andy Warhol: Enigma, Icon, Master," in Semiotica, vol. 80, no. 3–4, 1990.

Huhtamo, E., "Valkokankaan suuri ei-kukaan. Andy Warhol elokuvantekijana," Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 5, 1990.

Diana, M., "Blow Cinema," in Segnocinema (Vicenza), vol. 10, no. 46, November 1990.

Ulver, S., "Andy Warhol. Realita a mytus," Film and Doba, vol. 37, no. 1 Spring 1991.

Finnane, Gabrielle, Kosmorama (Copenhagen), vol. 37, no. 198, Winter 1991.

Tully, Judd, "15 Minutes Later: Warhol Now," in ARTnews, March 1992.

Byron, Christopher, "Andy's Magic Money Machine," in New York, 30 November 1992.

Dixon, W. W., "The Early Films of Andy Warhol," in ClassicImages (Muscatine, Iowa), no. 214, April 1993.

Stevens, Mark, "Saint Andy," in New York, 23 May 1994.

Assayas, O., "Andy Warhol," in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994.

Taubin, A., "My Time Is Not Your Time," in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 6, June 1994.

Long, Marion, "The Andy Warhol Museum," in Omni, June 1994.

Adams, Brooks, "Industrial-strength Warhol," in Art in America, September 1994.

James, D. E., "The Warhol Screenplays: Interview with Ronald Tavel," in Persistence of Vision (Maspeth, New York), no. 11, 1995.

Alexander, Paul, "Murky Image," in ARTnews, February 1995.

Bandy, Mary Lea, "Another Cinema Must Be Saved," in Journal ofFilm Preservation (Brussels), no. 50, March 1995.

Peck, Ron, and Stephen Thrower, "Directed by Paul Morrissey. An Interview with Paul Morrissey," in Eyeball, no. 4, Winter 1996.

On WARHOL: film—

American Masters: Superstar—The Life of Andy Warhol, 1990.

By the time he screened his first films in 1963, Andy Warhol was well on his way to becoming the most famous "pop" artist in the world, and his variations on the theme of Campbell's soup cans had already assumed archetypal significance for art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Given Warhol's penchant for the automatic and mass-produced, his movement from sculpture, canvas, and silk-screen into cinema seemed logical; and his films were as passive, as intentionally "empty", as significant of the artist's absence as his previous work or as the image he projected of himself. One of his earliest films, Kiss, was no more nor less than a series of people kissing in closeup, each scene running the three-minute length of a 16mm daylight reel, complete with flash frames at both ends. But it was his 1963 film Sleep, a six-hour movie comprised of variously framed shots of a naked sleeping man, which made Warhol a star on the burgeoning New York underground film scene. As though to dispel any doubts that his message was the medium, Warhol followed Sleep with Empire, an eight-hour stationary view of the Empire State Building, creating a kind of cinematic limit case for the Bazinian integrity of the shot. It was a film of such conceptual significance that if it did not exist it would have to be invented; yet it was a film that was equally unwatchable (even Warhol refused to sit through it).

During the period 1963 to 1967, Warhol made some fifty-five films, ranging in length from four minutes (Mario Banana, 1964) to twenty-five hours (* * * *, 1967). All were informed by the passive, mechanical aesthetic of simply turning on the camera to record what was in front of it. Generally, what was recorded were the antics of Warhol's E. 47th Street "Factory" coterie—a host of friends, artists, junkies, transvestites, rock singers, hustlers, fugitives, and hangerson. Ad-libbing, "camping," being themselves (and often more than themselves) before the unblinking eye of Warhol's camera, they became "superstars"—underground celebrities epitomizing Warhol's consumer-democratic ideal of fifteen minutes' fame for everyone.

Despite Warhol's cultivated image as the "tycoon of passivity," his films display a cool but very dry wit. Blow Job, for example, consisted of thirty minutes of a closeup of the expressionless face of a man being fellated outside the frame—a coyly humorous presentation of a forbidden act in an image perversely composed as a denial of pleasure (for the actor and the audience). Mario Banana simply presented the spectacle of transvestite Mario Montez eating bananas while in drag. Harlot, Warhol's first sound film, featured Mario (again eating bananas) sitting next to a woman in an evening dress, with the entirety of the virtually inaudible dialogue coming from three men positioned off-screen.

In the course of his films, Warhol seemed to be retracing the history of the cinema, from silence to sound to color (Chelsea Girls); from a fascination with the camera's "documentary" capabilities (Empire) to attempts at narrative by 1965. Vinyl, an adaption of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, involved a single high-angle camera position tightly framing a group of mostly uninvolved factory types, with protagonist Gerard Malanga sitting in a chair, reading his lines off a script on the floor, and being tortured with dripping candle wax and a "popper" overdose. When the camera accidently fell over in the middle of the proceedings, it was quickly returned to its original position without a break in the action. My Hustler offered a modicum of story, audible dialogue, and two shots—one of them a repetitive pan from a gay man talking to friends on the deck of a Fire Island beach house to his hired male prostitute sunning himself on the beach. The second shot, which fails to reveal the outcome of a wager made in the first section, shows the hustler and another man taking showers and grooming themselves in a crowded bathroom (a scene which made the pages of Life magazine for its brief male nudity).

It was Chelsea Girls, however, which resulted in Warhol's breakthrough to national and international exposure. A three-hour film in black-and-white and color, shown on two screens at once, it featured almost all the resident "superstars" in scenes supposedly taking place in various rooms of New York's Chelsea Hotel. After Chelsea Girls' financial success, subsequent Warhol films like I, a Man; Bike Boy; Nude Restaurant; and Lonesome Cowboys became a bit more technically astute and conventionally feature-length. Simultaneously, the scenes taking place in front of the camera in these films, while they maintained their bizarre, directionless, and ad-libbed quality, became more sensational in their presentation of nudity and sex. Warhol's last hurrah, Lonesome Cowboys, was actually shot in Arizona. It featured a number of "superstars" dressing in western garb, posing and walking through a nearly non-existent story amongst western movie sets. It was the last film Warhol completed before he was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by marginal factory character Valerie Solanas.

Warhol's shooting marked the beginning of a period of reclusiveness for the artist. Subsequent "Warhol" films were the product of cohort and collaborator Paul Morrissey, who has been credited with the increasing commercialism of the 1967 films (not to mention the decline of the factory "scene"). While Warhol lay in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds, Morrissey completed a film on his own titled Flesh—a series of episodes basically recounting a day in the life of Joe Dallesandro (who appears nude more often than not), featuring Warhol-like performances and camera work, but adding a discernible story line and even character motivations.

From 1970 to 1974, Morrissey's films under Warhol's name quickly became not only more commercial, but more technically accomplished and traditionally plotted as well. After Trash, a kind of watershed film that featured Joe and Holly Woodlawn in a narrative comedy about some marginal New York junkies and low-lifes, Morrissey even began to tone down the nudity. Women in Revolt, which was virtually a full-fledged melodrama, featured three transvestites playing the women of the title. Heat, shot in Los Angeles, had Dallesandro and New York cult actress/screen personality Sylvia Miles playing out a sleazy remake of Sunset Boulevard. L'Amour took the whole Morrissey coterie to Paris.

Morrissey's big step into mainstream filmmaking came with the 1974 production of Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, a preposterously gory, tongue-in-cheek horror film rendered in perfectly seamless, classical Hollywood style, and in a highly accomplished 3-D process. As outrageous as it was in its surrealistically bloody excess, and for all its "high-camp" attitude, the film bore almost no resemblance to the films of Andy Warhol; nor did Morrissey's Blood for Dracula, made at the same time, with virtually the same cast, but without 3-D. Since that time, Morrissey has pursued a career apart from Warhol's name as an independent commercial filmmaker.

—Ed Lowry

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.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (ca. 1927-1987) was a pioneer American pop artist and film maker. His paintings of Campbell soup cans and other mundane objects both piqued and delighted the art public and brought him fame.

Andy Warhol liked to shroud himself in mystery. "I never give my background, and anyway, I make it all up differently every time I'm asked," he said. His exact birth date and place only add to this mystery. Warhol (born Andrew Warhola) provided no information on the matter, so any definitive statement is subject to question. Based on his early years and college dates, it is estimated he was born in 1927 in Forest City, Pennsylvania, the son of a construction worker and miner from Czechoslovakia. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (1945-1949), receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree in pictorial design.

In 1949 Warhol arrived in New York City, where he made a meager living in advertising display work. He took some of his drawings to Glamour magazine and received a commission to make drawings of shoes. These were published and admired; he then worked for a shoe chain. In 1957 a shoe advertisement brought him the Art Directors' Club Medal. His work appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines, and in 1959 he exhibited his gold shoe drawings in a New York City gallery.

In 1960 Warhol began painting pictures with no commercial market in mind. He did a series on comic strips such as Dick Tracy, Popeye, Superman and the Little King. His paintings of Coca Cola bottles and Campbell soup cans, arranged in seemingly endless rows, were ridiculed when they were first shown. He created paintings of money and silk-screen portraits of Marilyn Monroe. His second New York show in 1962 was a critical success and perfectly timed, as pop art was just becoming an acceptable art form. His fascination with silk screen as an instrument for mass production led him to open a studio, dubbed The Factory, where he later made his films.

The Factory became a center for pop and would-be pop stars. It attracted a wide variety of glamorous people and an assortment of characters in the art and performing worlds. Although many of Warhol's films, such as Sleep (1963), Eat (1963), and Empire (1965), were lengthy depictions of the most mundane activity or object, some of his works anticipated future film themes or ridiculed certain subjects. Lonesome Cowboys (1968) treated homosexuality when it was taboo as a subject for commercial films and, at the same time, challenged the cowboy myth of courageous, macho riders of the range. With such works as Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970), Warhol focused on sexual themes. These were the forerunners of the pornographic film market of the 1970s and 1980s. By the mid-1970s his Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974) and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1974) enjoyed commercial success as satiric yet serious works. From 1963 to 1974, he had been involved in the production of more than sixty films of varying quality and subject matter.

Warhol and other pop artists drew their inspiration and imagery from popular culture, but they heightened the color and changed the scale to make the images larger than life. In doing so they redefined pictorial realism and extended its concept. Warhol's imagery can be classified in four broad categories: commercial products such as Brillo boxes and Heinz ketchup bottles, personality portraits of celebrities, modes of exchange such as trading stamps and bills, and disaster pictures of automobile accidents, electric chairs, gangster funerals and race riots.

In 1968 Warhol's celebrity status nearly cost him his life. A disturbed visitor to The Factory shot him, inflicting serious internal wounds. Warhol's slow recovery included a two-month hospital stay and a turn to a new direction, his post-Pop period. From 1970 onward, he increasingly turned to producing portraits of cult figures, prominent persons, and personal friends. These portraits, of figures such as Mao Tse-tung, Philip Johnson, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Carter, and Merce Cunningham display a softer, more delicate imagery than Warhol's earlier Pop Art paintings. His art of the 1970s moved closer to an abstract expressionist style and away from the figurative or realistic style of his work in the 1960s.In 1981 he undertook a series of myth paintings in which the subject matter treated mythical figures from popular culture sources, such as advertisements, comic strips and films. These works included Dagwood, Mickey Mouse, and Superman. Later in 1983 he created a series of endangered species paintings which depicted various threatened wild-life. As in all of his work, Warhol selected subjects with great popular imagery and treated the symbol and image as much as he does the real object itself.

As a social commentator (a role he denied), Warhol had the uncanny ability to mirror the trends and fads of his time. Recognizing the elements of an urban mass society heavily influenced by symbols, images, and the mass media, he made those symbols and images the subjects of his art. For Warhol and other Pop artists, these images have taken on a reality of their own. They were not only shaped by but also reshaped popular culture. Warhol left social and cultural historians visual documents of the significant elements from America's consumerist society of the postwar era—an important legacy.

Warhol died of heart failure hours after undergoing gall bladder surgery on February 22, 1987, in New York City.

Further Reading

Warhol's The Index Book (1970) is an entertaining selection of photographs, mostly of Warhol and his retinue. The most rewarding book on Warhol is John Coplans, Andy Warhol (1970), which includes a biographical sketch by Calvin Tomkins, a study and catalog of Warhol's films by Jonas Mekas, and a comprehensive selection of illustrations. See also Pat Hackett's Andy Warhol Diaries (1991). □

Warhol, Andy (b Pittsburgh, 6 Aug. 1928; d New York, 22 Feb. 1987). American painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman, film-maker, and writer, one of the most famous and controversial artists of the 20th century. During the 1950s he was enormously successful as a commercial artist in New York (specializing in shoe advertisements). In 1960 he began making pictures based on mass-produced images such as newspaper advertisements and comic strips, then in 1962 of Campbell's soup cans. The soup can pictures were exhibited in that year with sensational success and Warhol soon became the best-known figure in American Pop art. In the same vein 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 that he favoured allowed limitless 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 Warhol 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 idea that he took a paternal interest in his followers, but Eric Shanes (Warhol, 1991) writes: ‘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. As a film-maker, he 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). The incident caused him to turn away from the unconventional types who had made up his entourage and instead become associated with high society (in the 1970s he made an enormous amount of money churning out commissioned portraits of wealthy patrons). In his later years he was more famous for his celebrity-courting 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 doing this 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. Warhol published a celebrity magazine called Interview, and several books appeared under his name, some genuinely written by him, others put together from tapes. The Diaries of Andy Warhol appeared posthumously in 1989. In 1994 a museum dedicated to his work opened in his home town of Pittsburgh.

Warhol, Andy (1928–87). American painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman, film-maker, and writer, one of the most famous and controversial artists of the 20th century. During the 1950s he was enormously successful as a commercial artist in New York (specializing in shoe advertisements). In 1960 he began making pictures based on mass-produced images such as newspaper advertisements and comic strips, then in 1962 of Campbell's soup cans. They were exhibited in that year with sensational success and Warhol soon became the best-known 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 that he favoured 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 idea 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 he made an enormous amount of money churning out commissioned portraits of wealthy patrons. In the 1980s he sometimes collaborated with other painters, including the Graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. 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 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 promoting himself 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. Warhol published a celebrity magazine called Interview, and several books appeared under his name, some genuinely written by him, others put together from tapes. The Diaries of Andy Warhol appeared posthumously in 1989. In 1994 a museum dedicated to his work opened in his home town of Pittsburgh.

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

WARHOL, ANDY 1930-1987

Artist

More Than Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Andy Warhol is the pop artist known to many in the general public for saying that at some point everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. During the 1960s Warhol himself was famous for much longer, a celebrity to both artists and the public alike. No other artist, with the possible exception of Truman Capote, was invited to as many parties and as noted for his extravagant behavior.

Pop Artist

In the early 1960s Warhol went from being a shy artist from Pennsylvania who supported himself in advertising to the flamboyant enfant terrible of pop art and the avant-garde art scene in New York. He used Campbell's Soup cans, Brillo boxes, and photographs of movie stars (notably Marilyn Monroe) as subjects. His mass-produced paintings employ silk-screening rather than conventional brush strokes, both commenting on and celebrating the commercialization of art. Similarly, he promoted himself as an artist, becoming a self-made celebrity. A failed assassination attempt in 1968 made headlines when a disgruntled actress who had appeared in one of his films critically wounded him.

Other Ventures

In 1963 he formed the Factory, a collection of artists and actors who made highly experimental films—including Sleep (1963), an eight-hour-long movie of a man sleeping—and other creations. He also became the manager of the rock group the Velvet Underground, which was unpopular at the time but proved highly influential in the following decades.

Still Controversial

Warhol's work has always been controversial, both in content and technique. Detractors claim he was more of a con artist than an artist, while his supporters praise his work as both a critique and an affirmation of popular culture and the connection between money and art.

Sources:

Victor Bockris, The Life and Death off Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam, 1989);

David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Abrams, 1989);

Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art / Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

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); B. Colacello, Holy Terror (1990); W. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (2001); S. Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (2004); D. Dalton and T. Scherman, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (2009); A. C. Danto, Andy Warhol (2009).

Warhol, Andy (1928–87) US painter, printmaker, and film-maker, innovator of pop art. Warhol achieved immediate fame with his stencil pictures of Campbell's soup cans and his sculptures of Brillo soap pad boxes (1962). In 1965, he gave up art to manage the rock group The Velvet Underground. He continued to make films, which often have a voyeuristic quality.

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