Andy
Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1928.
At the age of 17, he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology
where he majored in pictorial design. Upon graduation, Andy Warhol
moved to New York where, in 1949, he began to work as an illustrator
for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and
The New Yorker. He also did advertising and window displays
for several retail stores. His first assignment was for Glamour
magazine for an article intitled Success is a Job in New York.
Throughout the 1950s, Warhol enjoyed great success as a commercial
artist. He won several commendations from the Art Director's Club
and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In these years, he shortened
his name from Warhola to Warhol. In 1952, Andy had his first individual
show at the Hugo Gallery, exhibiting Fifteen Drawings Based on
the Writings of Truman Capote. Other exhibitions followed, including
his first group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956.
Warhol was one of the first artists to understand the importance of
the mass media. He took his early material from comic strips and advertisements
which he found in tabloids like The National Inquirer and The
Daily News. In contrast to Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and
other representatives of Pop Art who integrated objects tel quel,
without modification, in their paintings, Warhol concentrated on -
at first hand painted - subjects of mass consumption and culture by
isolating and monumentalizing them, without using other objects in
the background and without preliminary sketches. Warhol used a projector
to put them on canvas. He made it plain and simple and therefore was
able to create the icons of Pop Art. In the Series and Singles
exhibition, his early work is well represented with Comics,
Campbell's Soup Cans, Dollar Bills and other Coca-Colas.
At the end of 1961, Andy created his first serial work with small
Campbell's Soup Cans. A year later, his Do It Yourself
pictures followed. In 1962, he began to experiment with silkscreening
images onto painted canvas, a technique that allowed him to repeat
a subject almost an infinite number of times. His series with Elvis
Presley, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood and other stars
was based on it. The new technique made Warhol a star. In these early
silkscreens, John Cage's chance operations came into play. The poet
Gerard Malanga served as Andy's assistant.
In 1963, Warhol said in an interview that he wanted to work like a
machine. He created the silkscreen paintings of Elizabeth Taylor.
It was the year of Cleopatra, starring her and Richard Burton.
Then, Warhol created the Death and Disaster series, showing
car accidents, electric chairs and more. In the beginning of 1964,
Andy moved to the Factory, which became the center of his work and
a synonymous for a purely serial method of operation. His Jackies
and Flowers fall into this period. But only his Brillo, Campell's
and other Kellogg's Boxes are actually identical to each other
since they came directly off the production line, whereas overlapping
and smudging created individual aspects in his series of paintings.
For the Jackies, Warhol used eight different images of Jacqueline
Kennedy taken just before and after the assassination of her husband,
whereas the Flowers use the same motifs, but differ in their
arrangement, color and cropping. Later came the Marilyns.
In the summer of 1964, the New York World Fair opened. Warhol had
been commissioned to do a mural for the American pavilion. Andy prepared
a 20 foot by 20 foot work in black and white called The Thirteen
Most Wanted Men featuring the police mug-shots of criminals. The
Governor of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller, already famous for similar
decisions, ordered it removed. When Warhol's idea for a substitution,
a painting with panels of a public official named Robert Moses, was
not accepted, Andy had his work painted over in silver.
His friend Henry Geldzahler suggested that Andy should give up his
Death and Disaster series and pointed out some flowers in a
magazine as an alternative subject. The result was Warhol's series
of glyphs of joy in the form of poppy flowers. They were commercially
successful and, according to Edward Sanders, predicted the American
Flower Power movement three years ahead of time.
In addition to painting, Warhol made 16mm films like Chelsea Girls,
Empire and Blow Job, which have become underground classics.
In 1968, Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society
for Cutting Up Men) walked into the Factory and shot the artist. The
attempted murder was nearly fatal. It changed Warhol's life and art.
In 1972, Andy was back. Now, the monochromatic backgrounds of his
silkscreens were replaced by more abstract-expressionistic paintings.
With Hammer and Sickle, Warhol explored still-life painting
in which he dealt with objects and their shadows. The theme of death
returned with Skulls and Shadows. He concentrated on
the interplay between printing and painting. In his Oxidation
series, urination takes the place of painting, a sarcastic reference
to Pollock's drippings.
In the early 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine
and wrote The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again).
He started the 1980s with the publication of POPism: The Warhol
'60s and with exhibitions of Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth
Century and the Retrospectives and Reversal series. He
also created two cable television shows, Andy Warhol's TV (1982)
and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes for MTV (1986). According
to the mood of the 1980s, he introduced his Diamond Dust Shoes
and Diamond Dust Beuys portraits. They referred to his beginnings
as a commercial artist in the 1950s. In the Last Supper, Warhol
finally celebrates his own immortality. He also engaged in a series
of collaborations with younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring.
Following routine gall bladder surgery, Andy Warhol died on the 22nd
of February 1987. In 1989, the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed
a major retrospective of his works. Five years later, the Andy Warhol
Museum opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. |
