Andy Warhol (1930-1987)

Andy Warhol was born in 1930 in the coal-mining town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, USA. His parents were Czech immigrants. When his father, a miner, died in a mining accident Andy was forced to support his family through odd jobs. He worked his way through Carnegie Tech., Pittsburgh where he studied commercial art. While in Pittsburgh, Warhol got to know the painter Philip Pearlstein, who was studying under Lepper at the time. In 1952 when Warhol graduated he moved to New York where he launched a successful career as an illustrator.

Warhol began producing Pop pictures in 1960 with works based on Popeye, Nancy and Dick Tracy comics. These early works were first shown as backdrops for department store windows and were painted in a loosely brushed style based on Abstract Expressionism. Warhol's first works using comic material tended to soften hard professional gestures and aggressive vocabulary of the texts and images. By contrast, Lichtenstein's work (neither of the artists had heard of the other at this stage) strained the harsh language of the comic strip to its utmost limits of perfection and artificiality. Warhol countered the scrupulous accuracy of the original genre with imprecision and deliberate error. In doing so, he soiled the comic strips narrow-minded ideological and decorative purity.

Warhol's next series, depicting the mass-produced goods of Campbell's Soup cans and Coke bottles, captured the clean-edged look of commercially manufactured objects and made him famous. He also turned his art into mass produced objects. At the time many critics were up in arms over the banal subject matter. Abstract Expressionists were also angry at losing their place in the art market to a young upstart commercial artist. Campbell's soup had a special significance to Warhol because it was his favourite meal as a child, his mother fed it to him every lunchtime. Suddenly a bland object became art. Warhol's images summed up the spirit of his society and times- from Marilyn Monroe to Chairman Zedong. The silk-screened image became a format Warhol used for many years. He became well-known in the early sixties for his many 'Marilyn' silk-screens, of Marilyn Monroe, and for his use of the Campbell's soup cans. Warhol mocked art with his 'Do-It-Yourself' series of 1962 where he left the picture half coloured to be finished by colouring by numbers.

Warhol was the quintessential Pop artist, his bizarre persona received almost as much attention as his artworks. His fame is like that of the rock stars he depicted. He used his studio, "The Factory" in 1962 to produce silk-screens, assisted by a team of workers which he called a human 'printing press'. Warhol claimed he wanted to be a machine and strove for anonymity in the production of his works. Warhol tries to anaesthetise the viewer's reaction to the, often morbid (e.g. Mrs Kennedy after the assassination and Marilyn Monroe after her suicide), images he presents. This imagery is most often repeated, almost endlessly, as it is silk-screened onto canvas. The repetition and crude synthetic colour are the instruments of a moral and aesthetic blankness which has been deliberately contrived. Warhol had an obsession for boredom, which manifested in his six hour movie 'Sleep' of a man sleeping and nothing else.

Warhol's working method is a constant process of action and reaction; he leaves the borders open between production, product and reproduction, between the image, the depiction and the depicted. His art is informed by the knowledge that it is the appearance given to a thing or an event, the manner in which it is mediated or presented, which gives it its meaning. The medium is itself the content of the message. Warhol characteristically takes the shortest possible route from reality to the picture.

In the mid-sixties he abandoned paint for film and produced over 300 movies with a regular cast of 'superstars'- the petty criminals and social outcasts that came to his studio. In 1968 one of his actresses, Valerie Solanis, shot and nearly killed him. She was the only member of S.C.U.M. (The Society for Cutting Up Men). Following a long period of recuperation Warhol left his life among the street people for the 'haute monde' of New York society. He subsequently became the unofficial portraitist to the rich and famous, painting, among others, actress Marilyn Monroe, rocker Mick Jagger, fashion designers Yves Saint-Laurent and Calvin Klein and leader of China, Mao Zedong.

Between 1962, the year of the first silk-screen prints on canvas, and 1970, the following 'types' appear in Warhol's iconography: film stars (Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando and others); stars of the art world (Mona Lisa, Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Castelli, Merce Cunningham, Andy Warhol and others); political stars (Jackie Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller and others), commissioned portraits; the gangster milieu ('Gangster Funeral', 'Thirteen Most Wanted Men'; electric chair); patterns and symbols of feeling and behaviour ("Happy" as the title of a portrait, flowers, kisses, 'Tunafish Disaster'); political action ('Race Riot', atomic bomb); news and information; stamps, etc. (postage stamps, discount stamps, company labels, trademarks, transport tickets and bank notes); consumer goods (Campbell's cans, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, packaging); and monuments (the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building).

Warhol made successful Hollywood films between 1967 and 1972. He also launched the still thriving today, 'Interview' magazine. Warhol published two witty and incisive books "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol" and "POPism: The Warhol '60s" (with Pat Hackett). Warhol's activities go far beyond the conventional boundaries of painting, along with his films he directed a night-club, The Velvet Underground.

Warhol not only wanted to turn the trivial and commonplace into art, but also to make art itself trivial and commonplace. Warhol applies the criterion of 'quantity as quality' to people as well as to consumer articles.

One of Warhol's most famous series was of Marilyn Monroe including 'Marilyn 3 Times' 1962.

Warhol was a 'personality' and established and enhanced the status of Pop Art. Andy Warhol died in 1987.

A Summary of Warhol's major style, Pop Art, is included.

This Biography was written by myself.
Please feel free to use this as a resource, not an assignment.
If you have any questions, suggestions or further information please email me.

Bibliography

Hopwood, G., 'Handbook of Art', North Clayton; The Specialty Press, 1979.
Gardner, H., 'Art Through The Ages', New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Williams, D. and Wilson B. V., 'From Caves To Canvas, An Introduction To Western Art', Sydney; McGraw-Hill, 1992.
Lucie-Smith, E., 'Movements in Art Since 1945', London; Thames and Hudson, 1983.
Osterwold, T., 'Pop Art', Berlin; Taschen, 1990.

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