Warhol, Andy

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Andy Warhol

Born August 6, 1928
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Died February 22, 1987
New York, New York

Artist, filmmaker, publisher, entrepreneur

Andy Warhol was one of the most imaginative, thought-provoking, and influential artists of the twentieth century. He was a key figure in the development of Pop Art, an artistic movement originating in the 1960s. In Pop Art, common objects are the subject of the artwork. He inspired outrage and delight with work such as his famous Campbell's Soup Cans series of paintings. He was also fascinated by fame and the famous, creating silk-screen images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), Elizabeth Taylor (1932–), and Elvis Presley (1935–1977). Above all Warhol challenged accepted ideas of what art should be and was responsible for breaking down the barrier between art and commercial design.

"Warhol may be the one person who has understood, consciously or not I don't know, that to be a star is to be a blank screen. He has lived by that. A blank screen for the projection of spectators' phantasms, dreams, and desires."

—Thierry de Duve in Andy Warhol, 2001.

Becomes commercial artist in New York City

He was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in McKeesport, a borough of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents had emigrated from what was then Czechoslovakia. Warhol had a childhood marked by poverty. His father, Andrej Warhola, was a laborer and construction worker. Like many men during the Great Depression (1929–41), Andrej was forced to travel in search of work. As a result Warhol and his two older brothers were dependent on their mother, Julia (Zavacky) Warhola. She made artificial flowers and sold them door-to-door. Warhol attended Holmes Elementary School as well as Saturday art classes at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University). After graduating from Schenley High School in 1945, he returned to the institute, enrolling as a freshman majoring in pictorial design. Despite almost failing his freshman year, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in fine art in 1949.

Soon after graduating from the institute, Warhol moved to New York City and began a career as a commercial artist. At first he shared an apartment. As he became more successful, however, he moved into his own apartment on Lexington Avenue. Warhol's mother moved in with him in 1953 and lived with him until 1971. She acted as housekeeper and cook. He worked and enjoyed the colorful, sociable lifestyle of New York's underground gay community. Warhol threw himself into many different projects. Perhaps his most famous commercial designs were the I. Miller shoes advertisements that appeared weekly in the New York Times. One of these advertisements won the Art Directors' Club medal in 1957. He also designed store window displays for the jeweler Tiffany and Company and numerous magazine and book covers. Along the way, he collected many awards and positive reviews.

By the late 1950s Warhol was earning $100,000 a year. He considered breaking out of the purely commercial art world and into fine art. He had already begun to sell some of his original works. He also gave away printed collections of his sketches to clients. Among the most collectable of these are the booklets The Gold Book (1957) and Wild Raspberries (1959). He continually experimented with new techniques and materials. Moreover, he began to mold his own appearance so that he became his own work of art. As his hair thinned, Warhol took to wearing bleached blond wigs. He also had plastic surgeries to reduce the size of his nose and to remove skin blemishes left over from a childhood illness. Warhol's physical image would soon become as recognizable as his best-known art works.

Working at The Factory

By 1960 Warhol was still taking on commercial projects, but only to fund his less profitable fine art. His attempt to sell paintings similar in style to the large-scale comic strips of Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) failed. In 1962 Warhol exhibited his series of thirty-three Campbell's Soup Cans paintings. First appearing at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the series consisted of canvases depicting soup cans stacked up in rows. The cans were realistically drawn; Warhol presented them in a strikingly plain way. This work had a dramatic effect

Pop Art

In the 1950s the United States entered a period of consumerism, or increased purchasing of mass-produced goods. This changed American life forever. The new era of consumerism followed the poverty of the Great Depression (1929–41) and the rationing of products during World War II (1939–45). Suddenly, consumer goods such as refrigerators, automobiles, and televisions became widely available. Mass production meant that items of all kinds became cheap to make and buy. Americans lost no time in taking advantage of these items. Pop Art was a celebration of this new materialistic culture. It made art from mass-produced objects, the media, and the world of glamour. It was first given a name by the British critic Lawrence Alloway in the journal Architectural Digest in 1958.

Pop Art became an alternative to the artistic style known as Abstract Expressionism, which had dominated the art world for most of the 1940s and 1950s. It made stars of such artists as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) and Mark Rothko (1903–1970). It was serious and philosophical; most people found it difficult to understand. Other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg (1925–), Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), David Hockney (1937–), and Andy Warhol drew inspiration instead from comic strips, advertising, packaging designs, and everyday scenes. Lichtenstein became famous for blowing up newspaper comic strips to enormous size. Hockney is well known for his gaudy paintings of empty swimming pools. Warhol, who is thought by many to be the most important Pop artist of all, recreated Campbell's soup cans and Brillo boxes on canvas and as sculptures.

Pop Art used humor to challenge conventional ideas of what the subject of art could be. It drew on images from the media, entertainment, and Hollywood. Lichtenstein's enormous newspaper comic strips often appeared on the walls of public buildings. Placing Pop Art in strange contexts changed the way celebrities and other popular images were seen. It encouraged the audience to look at them in new ways. This was the central idea in the Pop Art revolution: that popular, mass-produced images and designs could become art if they were treated as art, regardless of their subject matter. Andy Warhol is widely quoted as saying: "Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything."

on the art world of the time. Warhol had taken an image designed to sell soup and displayed it as something to be looked at as art. Although the subject matter did not conform to the art world's ideas about art, no one could deny Warhol's command of color and technique. At first, the Campbell Soup Company tried to sue Warhol for violating their copyright on the images. But they soon realized that the paintings were worth far more in publicity than the company could ever hope to win in damages.

In 1962 Warhol also opened a studio at East Forty-Seventh Street in New York known as The Factory. The studio was well named as much of the work, such as the silk-screened portraits of famous people, was mass-produced by assistants. This production method posed a problem for art dealers, however. Because Warhol did not sign his work, it became very difficult to identify one of his originals. Warhol's silk-screen portraits were often produced in a brash, cheap-looking style, as in the work Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962). Such art emphasized how artificial and manufactured the public image of famous people can be. The silk screens gave their subject an even more unreal appearance than the original publicity shots from which they were taken. Warhol produced similar images using the faces of many famous people, including the Chinese leader Mao Tsetung (1893–1976) and First Lady Jackie Kennedy (1929–1994), the grieving widow of assassinated president John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63; see entry).

The growing violence of the civil rights movement and, later, Kennedy's assassination, are thought by some critics to have inspired Warhol's Disasters series of paintings. Produced between 1962 and 1968, these depict, against loud and brightly colored backgrounds, the victims of road accidents, street riots, suicides, and even the electric chair. With such controversial material, Warhol and his work became the subject of frequent media stories and interviews. He often hired spokespeople to answer questions on his behalf. When he was persuaded to speak, he often invented answers about his childhood, even giving different birth dates and locations. But one story that seems to be true is that throughout his school days Warhol's mother fed him Campbell's soup for lunch.

In 1964 Warhol followed the success of the soup cans series with a series of sculptures based on Brillo soap-pad boxes. These were made from wooden boxes that were stenciled to look exactly like the Brillo boxes on sale in grocery stores everywhere. Once again Warhol challenged ideas of what qualified as art. This action also earned him a great deal of publicity. When the Brillo boxes were transported to Canada for an exhibition, they passed through customs as commercial goods. As such, an import duty had to be paid. Had they been classed as art, they could have been imported into Canada duty free.

Warhol is noted for working in a wide range of media. Besides the silk screens, paintings, and sculptures, he also published pamphlets, created a controversial mural for the 1964 New York World's Fair, staged media events, designed wallpaper, and sold dresses made from paper. He also made several 16mm movies (a film format used at the time) that continued to intrigue and shock audiences in the twenty-first century. One of these, called Chelsea Girls (1966), documented the lives of people living in the run down Chelsea Hotel in New York. The movie contained scenes edited together randomly and displayed on two screens at the same time. Another, Empire (1964), is an unedited film showing the Empire State Building during an eight-hour period. Trash appeared in 1970 and features live heroin injections and gay sex. In the early 1970s Warhol began publishing Inter/View (later known as Interview) magazine, a journal of fashion, glamour, and celebrity life that was still in business in 2004.

Warhol's superstars

In addition to Warhol's work, the media were curious about the artist's life. Warhol's lifestyle seemed to represent the permissive attitude of the 1960s, especially in big cities. The Factory became the headquarters for a group of misfits that Warhol called "the superstars." They included transvestites, strippers, rebellious rich kids, struggling musicians, drug addicts, and others outside the mainstream. Somehow Warhol himself managed to avoid being sucked into the chaos that surrounded him. He preferred to stay in what he called his "weekday rut" and keep regular working hours.

Some of those in Warhol's strange social circle became famous in their own right. Lou Reed and the band The Velvet Underground, for example, were promoted by Warhol between 1966 and 1968. He even produced their first album, which was called Andy Warhol. The Velvet Underground became the house band at Warhol's nightclub, known as The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Many of Warhol's followers worshipped him. However, Warhol often exploited their loyalty and treated them as a big joke. One of them, Valerie Solanis, shot and seriously wounded Warhol on June 3, 1968, claiming that he had too much control over her. Warhol was clinically dead for a short time, but doctors managed to save his life. Warhol later recalled in his book POPism: "I couldn't figure out why, of all the people Valerie must have known, I had to be the one to get shot. I guess it was just being in the wrong place at the right time. That's what assassination is all about."

By the 1970s Warhol was one of the most influential and respected of all living artists. Although his best work was completed during the 1960s, nothing he did failed to sell. In the early 1970s he could charge more than $25,000 for a single portrait. Warhol himself had become famous around the world. He socialized with music and movie stars and was entertained at lavish receptions by world leaders, including American presidents and the shah of Iran. He acted as host at Studio 54, a notorious New York nightclub, and lived a high-profile life of parties, movie premiers, and glittering social events.

Warhol died on February 22, 1987, from complications following a routine gall bladder operation. He left an estate valued at over $220 million. As an artist Warhol revolutionized the art world and helped narrow the gap between art and design. But perhaps his greatest achievement was his understanding of fame and the media. In the early 2000s the Warhol "brand" was familiar to millions. His Marilyn silk-screen portraits graced objects from T-shirts to coffee cups, while exhibitions of his work drew huge crowds. Warhol's own image, with his side-parted white wig, dark glasses, and leather jacket, was among the most recognizable in the early 2000s.