Fame, Media, Consumerism and Death

Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, Andy Warhol was destined to change the art world forever.

Upon graduation, he moved to New York, where he worked as an illustrator for publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and Harpers Bazaar. He also created window displays for several prominent retail stores at this time. Perhaps it was during these years that he developed his keen sense of style and realized the power of image and media manipulation. Throughout the 1950s, Warhol was one of New York City’s leading commercial artists, receiving numerous awards and accolades for his work.

He had his first solo show at The Hugo Gallery in 1952 and a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956.

In 1961, Warhol created his first series of screen prints featuring images of Campbell’s soup cans. The Pop Art movement thrived by presenting seemingly banal and everyday objects and giving them monumental importance, Warhol was simply making society aware of his own obsessions. The screen printing process allowed for multiple mass-produced screen-printed images with a seemingly endless variety of color and composition variations. Consumerism, one of Warhol’s central themes, was evident in many of the works produced at this time. Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo boxes, and dollar bills took on a life of their own. The screen printing technique and iconic treatment of Products as Art made Andy a star.

Warhol’s next thematic breakthrough was the Death and Disaster Series. Works depicting car crashes, electric chairs, and race riots. The heavily manipulated photographs, repeated over and over again, imply through their multiplicity that society is simply a silent witness to everyday horrors and that death is simply another aspect of life to be reckoned with. Public reaction to these works was not exactly positive, and on the advice of Henry Geldzahler, Warhol’s art dealer, he produced a series of less threatening floral prints.

In the years between 1962 and 1964, Andy altered his concentration and celebration of iconic images to include famous personalities and focused on the allure and mystique of Fame. It was at this point that he created the now legendary Series of paintings of the Marilyns, Jackies and Elvis, in his studio known as The Factory.

By this time, Andy Warhol had become a world-famous artist. He has exhibited at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, the Leo Castilli Gallery, and as far afield as Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. He produced work at an astonishing rate and mystified many with his uncanny ability to select images that literally became instant icons. Warhol blurred the lines between Fine Art and Commercial Art and forced the world to consider a new perspective that he had already unconsciously embraced.

FAMOUS WARHOLIAN QUOTES:

“When you think about it, department stores are like museums.”

“In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They are beautiful. Everybody is plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”

“I want to be a machine.”

The Factory was Andy’s experimental and arthouse film studio, where he and his entourage of self-proclaimed “superstars” produced over 300 experimental and pornographic films. The studio was much more than just an artist’s studio. It was THE meeting place for artists, musicians and actors. The atmosphere was a non-stop party where ideas, rock and roll, drugs, sex and art were mixed. In 1968, Warhol was shot two or three times by a female fanatic, Valerie Solanis, who claimed at her arrest that “he had too much control over my life.” The truth of the matter was that he had ignored her and her radical organization, SCUM (Society for Cutting Men). This near-fatal attack changed Warhol and the art of him. His artistic response to this episode, The Skulls and The Shadow Series, reflected an interplay between print and paint.

Moving away from repetition of iconic figures, Andy’s work focused on singular portraits of the rich and well-to-do. He continued to use screen printing but with a much more expressionist quality and singularity. Some of his subjects were Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Liza Minelli and the like.

In the early 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine. he also wrote the autobiographical The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and vice versa). He went on to produce numerous portraits of celebrities and members of the European elite. The phenomenally priced portraits photographed in Europe, were often produced by Warhol’s assistants at the factory with long-distance artistic “direction” by Andy. The subjects of him in the late 1980s, Mao-tse-Tung and The Endangered Species Series continued to confuse, delight, and surprise art lovers with their ever-new and ever-expanding catalog of colorful imagery.

During the last years of his life, Warhol began a series of collaborations and promotions with a whole new generation of artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Harring, and Francisco Clemente.

Interestingly, these were all Andy’s younger contemporaries carrying on his tradition of artistic revolution. On February 22, 1987, Warhol succumbed to cardiac arrest, and as a result of a botched gallbladder operation. The 1968 assassination attempt finally took its toll on the physically frail artist. In 1989, the Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition that comprised the largest retrospective exhibition of his work to date. In May 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Andy Warhol’s influence on 20th century art cannot be denied. His perception, exploration and experimentation of him in the field of Visual Arts is unmatched. There is hardly an artist today who is not touched in some way by his thematic and cultural achievements and vision. According to his will, he provided a sizable endowment fund for arts education and patronage, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

“Andy Warhol looks like a scream, hang it on my wall. Andy Warhol, Silver Screen, can’t tell them apart at all.”

-David Bowie, Hunky Dory, 1971

Websites of Interest:

The Andy Warhol Museum

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol Impressions

Text of this article © 2005 by John Keaton. All rights reserved.