^ Died on 22 February
1987: Andy Warhol, US Pop
artist born on 06 August 1928.
— 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
an artistically fertile America, 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. 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), 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 young America. 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 America.
He had lived for 58 years, helping to develop a new scene for American 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 American 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.
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 American 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 famous 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 famous films, SLEEP (1963), was eight
hours 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. On February 22, 1987, 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 1928 at 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 he had his first one-man exhibition at the
Hugo Gallery, New York. He 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 he had an individual exhibition of his drawings for Boy Book at
the Bodley Gallery, and his Golden Shoes were exhibited in Madison Avenue.
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 was also included in the exhibition The New Realists at the Sidney
Janis Gallery, New York, and 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)
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 1965 he had an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary
Art, Philadelphia. 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 of the same year he 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 the first movie for the
cinema, Flash, with Paul Morissey, followed by Trash in 1970. In 1969 the
first number of the magazine "Interview" appeared, 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 1976 the Württembergischer Kunstverein showed The Graphic Work
- 1942-1975, also shown in Düsseldorf, Bremen, Munich, Berlin and Vienna.
In 1978 he showed at the Kunsthaus, Zurich, and at the Louisiana Museum,
Humblebaek. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, showed The Portraits
of the 70s in 1979. In 1980 he became production manager of the cable TV
station "Andy Warhol's TV". In the same year Joseph Beuys by Andy Warhol
was shown at the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva, he showed Ten Portraits
of Jews of the Twentieth Century at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami,
and at the Jewish Museum, New York, and POPism, The Warhol '60s was published.
In 1981 the exhibition Andy Warhol - Paintings
1961-1968 was shown at the Kestner-Gesselschaft, Hanover, and at the Städtische
Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. The Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna,
showed Warhol '80. From 1982 to 1986 he 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
at the Leo Castelli Gallery, and at the Galeria Fernando Vijande, Madrid.
He exhibited Warhol's Animals: Species at Risk at the American
Museum of Natural History, New York, and at the Cleveland Museum of Natural
History, Cleveland. In 1986 he made portraits of Lenin and self-portraits.
In 1987 he died as a result of an operation. In 1988 the Hamburger Kunstverein
showed Death Pictures. In 1989 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized
the hitherto largest retrospective exhibition of his work. His estate was
auctioned at Sotheby's. His will provided for an endowment fund for the
patronage of art.
— 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, interviews, 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.
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait — Liz (1964)
— Campbell's Tomato Soup — Campbell's Tomato Soup (from a banner) (1968)
— The Velvet Underground and Nico, 1967 4 (a banana)
— Kimiko Powers 1971-1972 (1981) — Flowers (1964) — Sandro-Bottic — Beethoven |
^ Born on 22 February
1778: Rembrandt Peale, US painter and writer.
