ART
4 2-DAY 06 AUGUST |
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Died on 11 August 1923: Luigi
Rossi,
Swiss artist born on 10 March 1853. — Luganese, Luigi Rossi, il cui padrino di battesimo fu nientemeno che Carlo Cattaneo [15 Jun 1801 – 06 Feb 1869], si trasferirà ancor bambino (a tre anni) a Milano. Ad undici anni è già iscritto a Brera, allievo del Bertini, insieme al Bazzarro e a Tallone, e soprattutto di Carlo Mancini. I suoi sono paesaggi all'aperto (eseguiti insieme ad Eugenio Gignous) e quadretti di genere: Questua infruttuosa (1871), In assenza del padrone (1872). E proprio in questi anni si trasferirà per un periodo con la famiglia nell'Astigiano. Potrà quindi entrare in contatto con la pittura di Leonardo Bistolfi [15 Mar 1859 – 02 Sep 1933] e Marco Calderini [20 Jul 1850 – 26 Feb 1941]. Luigi Rossi nel 1878, ormai di nuovo a Milano, conosce il successo: il suo Ritorno al paese natio non fu premiato col principe Umberto solo perché il pittore conservava la nazionalità svizzera. I suoi quadri, fin d'allora, sono legati a momenti di vita rustica e familiare (La culla, La polenta, eseguiti in Val Verzasca). Periodo chiave fu la tappa parigina (1884-1888), dove illustrerà libri di Daudet (Tartarin sur Les Alpes, 1885; Sapho, 1887), di Loti (Madame Chrysantème, 1887), di Prévost, di Chateaubriand, di Keller e di Rambert. Nel 1888 è di nuovo a Milano, a contatto con il mondo scapigliato della Famiglia artistica e della Patriottica; frequenta infatti gli ambienti pittorici e culturali locali, amico del Grubicy, del Mentessi, del Morbelli, di Giacomo Puccini, di Arrigo e Camillo Boito. Nel 1891 con il giornalista Giorgio Molli compie un viaggio in Sicilia: molti i paesaggi, magari eseguiti poi a memoria nello studio milanese, e le impressioni. Il viaggio in Sicilia fu pure ispirazione per l'illustrazione, insieme all'amico Luigi Conconi [20 May 1852 – 23 Jan 1917], cremoniano, delle pastorali di Longo Sofista Daphnis et Chloé. Amico fraterno di Gian Pietro Lucini, poeta e critico simbolista, si fa partecipe di un simbolismo vigoroso e talvolta anche sognante. Nascono così quadri come Temporale in montagna (1892), Rêves de Jeunesse (1894) (si notano qui contatti con la pittura svizzera e con Hodler in particolare), il Mosto (1898), ritenuta la sua opera migliore. Non fu estraneo neppure al liberty (Donna, dei fichi, Genzianella). Fu un pittore sociale, interessato alla realtà contadina, vicino ad Augusto Osimo e Giuseppe Mentessi. Insegnò nelle scuole dell'Umanitaria (1902-1912), collaborò al giornale pacifista Giù le armi. Nel 1911 si iscrisse al sodalizio degli acquarellisti lombardi. Nel 1921, alla Galleria Pesaro di Milano, si tenne un'importante mostra antologica del pittore. — In The Park (46x75cm; 603x1000pix, 164kb) — Contadinella in attesa (1894, 72x46cm; 476x301pix, 53kb) — Dolce cinguettio (83x55cm; 476x299pix, 54kb) — Piccole mamme (24x36cm; 323x454cm, 58kb) — La polenta (38x55cm; 312x454pix, 53kb) — Le ranette (53x 68cm; 339x439pix, 51kb) — Villaggio siciliano (344x260pix, 30kb). |
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Born on 06 August 1932: Howard Hodgkin,
British Abstract painter. [Is Hodgkin kin to Hodgkin's
Lymphoma?] The paintings that Hodgkin produces hover midway between the figurative and abstract. He says that he paints "representational pictures of emotional situations". The starting point, detailed in the evocative titles Kerala (1992), When Did We Go to Morocco?, (1993), and Rain at Rutland Gate (1994), root the works in the factual: places, people, times of day and changes in the weather. However, some titles also suggest an emotional state of mind, for example Passion, (1984) and In a Crowded Room, (1986). It is the suggestion, rather than the absolute, which is conveyed by the differing applications of paint used by Hodgkin. A variety of marks cover the surfaces of the works, from the broad sweeps of paint that frame the work to round, repeated dots. LINKS Nick's Room (1977 lithograph with hand color, 52x61cm) [click on the link and zoom in to oversize if you want, but you won't get any more detail than in a postage stamp; as here >] After Corot (1982, 37x38cm) Small Henry Moore at the Bottom of the Garden (1977, (53x53cm) Rain in the Palazzo A Storm (1977, 41x48cm) _ This watercolor was made by Hodgkin after visiting Oklahoma in 1977 where there had been a series of violent storms. His work recreates the feelings or moods awakened in him by the subject. Although not a representation of a storm the colors and shapes all suggest aspects of wild weather, white lightning, blue rain and the red of fire. The heavy mass in the center perhaps suggests the earth. Hodgkin often paints frames to his work but here the energy of his marks and colors appear to have burst from the frame’s confines. |
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Died on 06 August 1660: Velásquez was Spain's greatest
Baroque artist, Velásquez was born in Seville on 06 June 1599;
both his parents were from the minor nobility. Velázquez's early works,
fall into three categories-the bodegón, (everyday subjects combined with
still life), portraits, and religious scenes. |
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Born on 06 August 1928: Andrew Warhola
Andy Warhol' US filmmaker,
Pop
artist, who said: In the future everyone will be famous
for fifteen minutes. But he was not everyone. He died
on 22 February 1987. Author of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Portraits of the Seventies (1979), Andy Warhol's Exposures (1979). Out of the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s came an artist who became the icon of the free spirit. Andy Warhol introduced the world, and particularly the artistically fertile US, to the idea of life as an art. Gone were the days of portraiture and classical sculpture this was the era of the movie star, the celebrity, and consumerism. Warhol looked at the life surrounding him and portrayed it on his canvases and in his films, stating that "if you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." Yet, to critics, the most intriguing aspect of Warhol was his private life, an indefinable mixture of artistic creativity, mystery, and sexual scandal. It is this very inexpressibility that comes through in the artist's work, giving Warhol an aura of cool acceptability and ambiguity. Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, Warhol was one of three boys in a Czechoslovakian immigrant working-class family. Growing up during the Great Depression in Forest City, Pennsylvania, Warhol faced an unstable household, further complicated by the death of his father in 1942. Three years later, Warhol dropped out of high school and enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he received his BA in pictorial design in 1949. After graduation, Warhol moved to New York, living in a coed basement apartment. He was a strange one to the others, being very quiet, young, and having an unusually white pallor. Angry with Warhol for not speaking to her, one of the female occupants of the apartment once threw an egg at him, which hit him in the head. The quiet young artist spent most of his time drawing and taking his work around to agencies in a brown paper bag, as he did not have enough funds for a portfolio. Intrigued by the odd character who walked into her office holding a brown paper bag, Glamor art director Tina Fredericks commissioned Warhol to design shoes, inadvertently launching him into the world of commercial arts. Gaining the attention of exclusive shoe store I. Miller, Warhol was soon offered an appointment in their art department. In 1949, Warhol changed the spelling of his name because of a credit that mistakenly read "Drawings by Warhol" for the article "Success is a Job in New York". Around this time, his eyes began to bother him, and Tina Fredericks urged him to go to an oculist. Having been told he had "lazy eyes," Warhol wore opaque glasses that had a tiny pinhole for him to see through these became his signature accessory, even though they were hideous. Warhol dyed his hair a distinct silver, showing a flair for the dramatic that set him apart from other artists. With the name change and his position in the commercial field, the intrepid artist soon created a niche for himself, becoming known for his exploration of the shoe as a reflection of the person. Warhol captured the essence of various people in his shoes, creating the likeness of celebrities and friends on paper. It did not matter if the shoe features were in the right places I. Miller loved his drawings. He received the Art Directors' Club Medal for his shoe designs in 1957. Earlier, in 1952, the artist had his first solo exhibition, showing pictures drawn for Truman Capote's short stories; unfortunately, the exhibit did not make much of an impact in the art world. By this time however, Warhol had an agent, Fritzie Miller, who got him contracts with big magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. He worked with Eugene Moore to create window displays for Bonwit's, a department store. The introspective artist, who wore only old clothes, radiated a charm and mystery in both his manner and work that began to be noticed by people in the business. During this period of development in his life, Warhol came into contact with other cultures, both local and abroad, that were to have an influence on his later artwork. In the mid-1950s, he was part of a theater crowd that focused primarily on the plays of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht; Warhol especially admired Brecht's idea of realism and would later apply the philosophy to his work. Influences from abroad came through his six-week tour of Europe and Asia, where he began his own collection of modern art, buying works from artists such as Joan Miró and Larry Rivers. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol combined all of these early influences and experiences into a style that was distinctly his own and yet allowed others to be involved in the creative process. This came to be known in art history as American Pop art, a movement against the "original" as the bastion of the elite. Warhol's outlook on artwork focused not on the end result, the "original work of art," but on the creative processes that produced the work of art. Reflecting this philosophy was the artist's use of the silk-screen, a process that allowed multiple identical images to be produced by anyone: Warhol liked to have his friends create prints using his silk-screens. Most of Warhol's creative work at this time took place in his studio, which he called "the Factory". This work, done between 1962 and 1964, ranged from portraits of friends and celebrities to car crashes to electric chairs to consumer products. Perhaps the most famous of his Factory work consumer product images of Campbell's Soup, Brillo boxes, green stamps, and Coca-Cola distinctly point to Warhol's fascination with the US's growing identification with brand-name labels. In 1962 Warhol had his first show in the Stable Gallery. It was a huge success, widely reported in the press and fully sold out. His paintings, manufactured in the Factory, were bought almost as soon as they were shown. [Gullible] people stood in lines at exhibit openings to look at his work. A trendsetter, Warhol and his work were definitely a hot commodity. But in 1965, Warhol declared Pop art "dead" and decided to retire from painting; his last gallery exhibition at Leo Castelli in 1966 consisted of Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds. From 1966 onward, Andy Warhol concentrated on making films, initially intent on studying the lives of the people surrounding him. The first films for which he gained recognition were shot between 1963 and 1964, a total of eight hours, with the titles of Sleep, Kiss, Haircut, Eat, Blow Job, and Empire. Awarded the Independent Film Award by Film Culture, this series of films translated Warhol's philosophy on painting to the screen: the focus was not on the finished product (indeed, most of these films could never be mass-marketed [meaning they were flops?]), but on the creative [?] processes that went into the work. Just as Warhol emphasized the fact that others could use his silk-screens. and create paintings, so his films underscore the truth that anybody could take subjects and film them. Not only could the subjects be ordinary people, but Warhol also made this often-quoted prediction: "In the future everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." Those made famous in Warhol's pictures included Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, Ultra Violet, and Viva. Warhol began working with a rock band called The Velvet Underground in 1965, introducing them to the chanteuse Nico; to the music of the band he orchestrated an interactive show consisting of images and lights and called it The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The mixed media showcase created an international sensation when it opened at the DOM nightclub in New York City. It was an onslaught on the senses, and it described in music and art the feeling of the young US. Much has been speculated about Andy Warhol's sex life. He featured both men and women in his artistic endeavors, and his entourage was a mingling of the two sexes. Most people tend to think Warhol was gay, and he did have boyfriends. However, it is a mystery as to whether or not he actually was intimate with these men; Warhol's attitude was more asexual than homosexual. On 03 June 1968, Valerie Solanas, the mentally unstable founding member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), shot Andy Warhol two times in the stomach; she had mistaken him for a kind of god, telling police that "he had too much control over my life." Warhol spent two months in the hospital recovering from the wounds. This shooting was the inspiration for the 1996 film entitled I Shot Andy Warhol. In 1968, Warhol tackled the next level in the artistic medium and wrote a novel called a. a demonstrated the philosophy Warhol had expressed previously on canvas and reel it did not take an accomplished author to write a paper. In order to prove his idea, Warhol recorded twenty-four hours of conversation that occurred within the Factory and entitled it a. In 1969, he founded the magazine inter/View, and in 1975 he published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. Warhol died in February of 1987 from gall bladder surgery complications. For almost two decades, Andy Warhol had maintained the position of an infamous media icon, notorious for his parties and respected for his artistic taste; he backed young and upcoming artists, lending his support to the development of modern art in the US. He had lived for 58 years, helping to develop a new scene for US art and a new ideology in the artist's lexicon. Andy Warhol's impact on the art world cannot be overlooked, and his influence lingers to this day, "I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked." He was one of the most enigmatic figures in US art. His work became the definitive expression of a culture obsessed with images. He was surrounded by a coterie of beautiful bohemians with names like Viva, Candy Darling, and Ultra Violet. He held endless drug- and sex-filled parties, through which he never stopped working. He single-handedly confounded the distinctions between high and low art. His films are pivotal in the formation of contemporary experimental art and pornography. He spent the final years of his life walking around the posh neighborhoods of New York with a plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills, buying jewelry and knicknacks . His name was Andy Warhol, and he changed the nature of art forever. Andy Warhol's exact birth date is unknown, though one can assume it is between 1927 and 1930. What is known is that he was born to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents in Forest City, Pennsylvania. He was a shy quiet boy, leaving high school to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He received his bachelors of fine arts degree from there in 1949, and headed immediately to New York. In New York, Warhol found design jobs in advertising. Before long he had begun specializing in illustrations of shoes. His work appeared in Glamour, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. In the mid-'50s he became the chief illustrator for I. Miller Shoes, and in 1957 a shoe advertisement won him the Art Director's Club Medal. During this time, Warhol had also been working on a series of pictures separate from the advertisements and illustrations. It was this work that he considered his serious artistic endeavor. Though the paintings retained much of the style of popular advertising, their motivation was just the opposite. The most famous of the paintings of this time are the thirty-two paintings of Campbell soup cans. With these paintings, and other work that reproduced Coca-Cola bottles, Superman comics, and other immediately recognizable popular images, Warhol was mirroring society's obsessions. Where the main concern of advertising was to slip into the unconscious and unrecognizably evoke a feeling of desire, Warhol's work was meant to make the viewer actually stop and look at the images that had become invisible in their familiarity. These ideas were similarly being dealt with by artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg and came to be known as Pop Art [many people prefer pop-tarts]. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Warhol produced work at an amazing rate. He embraced a mode of production similar to that taken on by the industries he was mimicking, and referred to his studio as "The Factory." The Factory was not only a production center for Warhol's paintings, silk-screens, and sculptures, but also a central point for the fast-paced high life of New York in the '60s. Warhol's obsession with fame, youth, and personality drew the most wild and interesting people to The Factory throughout the years. Among the regulars were Mick Jagger, Martha Graham, Lou Reed, and Truman Capote. For many, Warhol was a work of art in himself, reflecting back the basic desires of an consumerist US culture. He saw fame as the pinnacle of modern consumerism and reveled in it the way artists a hundred years before reveled in the western landscape. His oft-repeated statement that "every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes" was an incredible insight into the growing commodification of everyday life. By the mid-'60s Warhol had become one of the most [in]famous [so-called] artists in the world. He continued, however, to baffle the critics with his aggressively groundbreaking work. Putting aside much of the "pop" imagery, he concentrated on making films. His films, as his paintings had been, were primarily concerned with getting the viewer to look at something for longer than they otherwise would. Using film, Warhol could control the viewer's attention. One of his most [in]famous films, Sleep (1963), was eight hours [others say 6, but who can stay awake long enough to tell?] of the poet John Giorno asleep in his bed. Warhol's movement into film directing and production brought him into contact with dozens of artists and actors interested in working in The Factory. One of these was actress and writer Valerie Solanas, who had for some time been trying to get Warhol to produce one of her scripts. In 1968, in anger at Warhol's disinterest, Solanas (the founder and only member of S.C.U.M., the Society for Cutting Up Men), shot and nearly killed Warhol. During Warhol's extended convalescence he began to work on a new mode of art. Considered his "Post-Pop" period, the images were primarily portraits of living superstars. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Warhol produced hundreds of portraits, mostly in silk screen. His images of Liza Minnelli, Jimmy Carter, Albert Einstein, Elizabeth Taylor, and Philip Johnson express a more subtle and expressionistic side of his work. During the final years of his life, Warhol became the hero of another generation of artists, including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente. Their work represents a continuation of an artistic [?] revolution begun by Andy Warhol. Warhol died of heart failure at his home in New York. Many suggested it was a poorly performed minor surgery he had had earlier that day, while others believed it was due to the general weakening of his body after the shooting. What remains certain is that during the sixty years of whirlwind and mystery that was Andy Warhol's life, the art world (and the world at large) became a more fun and interesting place. Born in Pittsburgh of Czechoslovak immigrant parents. In 1954 he left school with a high school diploma. Between 1945 and 1949 he studied pictorial design and art history, sociology and psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh. Met Philip Pearlstein and moved to New York with him in 1949. He worked for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, did window displays for Bonwit Teller and his first advertisements for I. Miller shoe company. In 1952 Warhol designed stage sets, dyed his hair straw-blond and moved into a house in Lexington Avenue with his mother and several cats. In 1954 he was in a collective exhibition at the Loft Gallery, New York. In 1956 his Golden Shoes were exhibited. He traveled in Europe and Asia. In 1960 he made his first pictures based on comic-strips and company trade names. In 1962 he produced his silk-screen prints on canvas of dollar notes, Campbell's Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, etc. He started his series of disaster pictures: Car Crash, Plane Crash, Suicide, Tunafish Disaster and Electric Chair. Between 1962 and 1964 he produced over 2000 pictures in his "Factory". In 1963 he made the movies Sleep (6 hours long, a great cure for insomnia) and Empire (8 hours long). In 1964 his Flower Pictures were exhibited at the Galerie Sonnabend, Paris. He was also forced for political reasons to paint over his Thirteen Most Wanted Men which he had attached to the wall of the New York State Pavilion for the World's Fair in New York. He made his first sculptures with affixed silk-screen prints of company cartoons. In 1967 he produced the first record of the rock band "the Velvet Underground" and between 1966 and 1968 made several films with them. His Cow Wallpaper and Silver Pillows were shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1968 he had an exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In July 1968 Warhol was shot down, and dangerously wounded, by Valerie Solanis, the only member of S.C.U.M. (The Society for Cutting Up Men). In 1968 he brought out his novel "a", which consisted of telephone calls recorded in his Factory. He made his first movie for the cinema, Flash, with Paul Morissey, followed by Trash [a title that would be appropriate for much of Warhol's work] in 1970. In 1969 appeared the first number of the magazine Interview, which Warhol helped bring out. Between 1969 and 1972 he was commissioned to do a number of portraits. In 1972 he showed at the the Kunstmuseum, Basle. The first edition of his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) was published in 1975. In 1980 Warhol became production manager of the cable TV station "Andy Warhol's TV". From 1982 to 1986 Warhol made pictures of disasters. In 1982 he exhibited a series of oxidations and pictures of Nazi architecture at the documenta "4" exhibition, Kassel. He exhibited Guns, Knives, Crosses and Animals: Species at Risk. In 1986 he made portraits of Lenin and self-portraits. In 1987 he died as a result of an operation. Death Pictures was shown in 1988. Andy Warhol's media fame has often disguised the fact that he is one of the most serious and important artists of the twentieth century. He quite simply changed how we see the world around us and how we see art. His work presents images of twentieth-century mass culture in a flat graphic style that mimics deliberately common source material. He was one of the first artists to recognize that art was being usurped by television, fashion and film, and he began to deal with art in those terms. He fused image and techniques of illustration and mechanical reproduction from his commercial art background into his work. The first artist to have done so, he opened the door for other artists to follow in his footsteps, among US Pop artists, Warhol was the first and foremost. In 1962, Warhol created the first of a series of oversized Campbell's Soup cans. These paintings captured the imagination of the media and the public in a way that no work by any of Warhol's contemporaries had, and created worldwide recognition for this new US art, quickly labeled Pop Art. It was condemned by many critics as consumerism, but was enthusiastically received by the art public, particularly in Europe and Japan and other places fascinated by Hollywood and all things from the US. Throughout his career, Warhol remained true to the Pop technique and iconography which he defined for himself. In the 1970s, while maintaining his own enviable celebrity status, Warhol began exploring the dimensions of stardom. He created portraits of hundreds of international celebrities: political figures, royalty, musicians, and movie stars. He partied almost nightly with a glittering set of "beautiful people" and found that he had the power to create "superstars" through his art, films, Interview, or through mere association with the artist himself. From the beginning, Warhol insisted on the power of the familiar, indeed one of the main qualities of Warhol's images is their extreme obviousness: the most famous brand names (Campbell's Soup, Coca-Cola), the most famous people (Elvis, Marilyn Monroe), the most famous paintings (the Mona Lisa), and the most famous objects (money, newspapers). Warhol's art teaches us to accept our own present society, the late twentieth century, in all its richness and triviality. Marcel Duchamp defined Dadaist "Ready-made" art in 1913 when he displayed a sculpture consisting of a bicycle wheel upended on a stool. Warhol understood the Dadaist's contempt for the traditional notions of what constitutes a work of art, and their suggestion that the essential factor in the creation of art is not necessarily skill but choice. Duchamp was, not surprisingly, an admirer of Warhol's work as well. He summed up our fascination and perplexity with Warhol by making the observation, "What interests us is the concept that he wants to put fifty Campbell's Soup cans on a canvas." It s, indeed, a concept that changed the way we see art and how we see ourselves. Warhol was an initiator and leading exponent of the Pop art movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. An adroit self-publicist, he projected a concept of the artist as an impersonal, even vacuous, figure who is nevertheless a successful celebrity, businessman, and social climber. The son of Czechoslovak immigrants, Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, with a degree in pictorial design in 1949. He then went to New York City, where he worked as a commercial illustrator for about a decade. Warhol began painting in the late 1950s and received sudden notoriety in 1962, when he exhibited paintings of Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes. By 1963 he was mass-producing these purposely banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic silk screen prints, and he then began printing endless variations of portraits of celebrities in garish colors. The silk screen technique was ideally suited to Warhol, for the repeated image was reduced to an insipid and dehumanized cultural icon that reflected both the supposed emptiness of American material culture and the artist's emotional noninvolvement with the practice of his art. Warhol's work placed him in the forefront of the emerging Pop art movement in the US. Andy Warhol would become one of the most influential artists of the latter part of the 20th century. He is born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A frail and diminutive man with a shock of silver-blond hair, Warhol was a major pioneer of the pop art movement of the 1960s but later outgrew that role to become a cultural icon. Warhol was the son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and his father was a coal miner. For years, there was confusion as to his exact date and place of birth because Warhol gave conflicting accounts of these details, probably out of embarrassment of his provincial origins. "I'd prefer to remain a mystery," he once said. "I never give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked." He enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology and graduated with a degree in pictorial design in 1949. That year, he moved to New York City, where he found work as a commercial illustrator. After being incorrectly credited as "Warhol" under an early published drawing, he decided to permanently remove the "a" from his last name. He began painting in the late 1950s and took literally the advice of an art teacher who said he should paint the things he liked. He liked ordinary things, such as comic strips, canned soup, and soft drinks, and so he painted them. In 1962, he received notoriety in the art world when his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap-pad boxes were exhibited in Los Angeles and New York. In 1963, he dispensed with the paintbrush and began mass-producing images of consumer goods and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. These prints, accomplished through his use of a silk-screen technique, displayed multiple versions of the same image in garish colors and became his trademark. He was hailed as the leader of the pop art movement, in which Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others depicted "popular" images such as a soup can or comic strip as a means of fusing high and low culture and commenting on both. Although shy and soft-spoken, Warhol attracted dozens of followers who were anything but. This mob of underground artists, social curiosities, and hangers-on operated out of the "Factory," Warhol's silver-painted studio in Manhattan. In the mid-1960s, Warhol began making experimental films, employing his friends as actors and billing them as "superstars." Some of his films were monumental essays on boredom, such as the eight-hour continuous shot of the Empire State Building in Empire (1964), and others were gritty representations of underground life, like The Chelsea Girls (1966). He also organized multimedia events such as "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable" and sponsored the influential rock group the Velvet Underground. In 1968, Warhol was shot and nearly killed by Valerie Solanis, a follower who claimed he was "exercising too much influence" over her life. After more than a year of recuperation from his wounds, Warhol returned to his career and founded Interview magazine, a publication centered on his fascination with the cult of celebrity. He became a fixture on the fashion and jet-set social scenes and was famous for pithy cultural observations like, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Meanwhile, he continued to produce commercially successful silk-screen prints of entertainment and political figures. In the 1980s, after a period of relative quiet in his career, he returned to the contemporary art scene as a mentor and friend to a new generation of artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. With the rise of postmodern art, he came to be regarded as an archetypal role model by many young artists. Warhol died in a hospital, of a heart attack, shortly after a gall bladder operation. In 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest single-artist museum in the United States, opened in Pittsburgh. LINKS — Do It Yourself (Seascape) (1962) The Souper Dress (1960) Liz (1964) Campbell's Tomato Soup (1968, 38x25cm) _ Campbell's Tomato Soup Campbell's Tomato Soup (from a banner) (1968) The Velvet Underground and Nico (31x31cm) [a banana] (1967) Kimiko Powers 1971~1972 (1972, 56x56cm) Birmingham Race Riot (1964, 51x61cm) Flowers (1964, 56x56cm) Beethoven Marilyn Marilyn Monroe [x 50] (1962) Mao (1973) Goethe [x 4] Gun (1981) Spam [x 35] Last Supper Dollar Signs Self-Portrait Sandro-Botticelli Polaroid Self~Portrait PICTORIAL SATIRE OF WARHOL'S POLAROID SELF~PORTRAIT (believed to be by “Troudgair”, or possibly by “Kriegsloch”, or even Bernardo Roderironico Osvaldo Minimaximiliano Arturito Guerra y Agujero de Nomedigas y Yabasta, more commonly known as “Nombresinfin”.) |