Andy Warhol

Ironically, Andy Warhol’s dictum, “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” does not apply to him. [1] Early in his career Warhol achieved a celebrity status unlike any other artist; he sought his fame, cultivated others who were famous, and lived in a style that to many seemed excessive. An American icon and the quintessential Pop artist, he often depicted such American emblems as Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie Kennedy. His notoriety and the market for his work continued well after his death and have assumed global proportions.

Andrew Warhola (1928–1987) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to parents who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia. His father worked in a coal mine, and his mother, a devout Roman Catholic, handcrafted flowers and decorated Easter eggs. Even as a young child, “Andy” collected autographed photographs of movie stars, enjoyed drawing and painting, and attended a free art school at the age of fourteen. In 1945, he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he majored in pictorial design. After his graduation four years later, he moved to New York and became a successful commercial artist. He created advertisements for such fashion-oriented magazines as Glamour, Seventeen, and Vogue, and made window displays for Bonwit Tellers, one of which, in 1961, included early paintings based on the comics. He received many awards for his graphic designs, and became widely recognized for his drawings of shoes, which culminated in a book, À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu.

Like other artists of his generation, including his classmate Philip Pearlstein, Warhol wanted to break away from the domineering grip of Abstract Expressionism, which emphasized individualism and the artists’ gestures. Instead, he preferred art that was representational and mechanical. He became a great admirer of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose drawing of a light bulb he bought in 1958. Warhol frequented their gallery, run by Leo Castelli, and on one visit encountered the comic-strip-derived paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, which induced Warhol to abandon his efforts in that arena.

In 1962, Warhol began work on the various series that are indelibly associated with him and Pop art: Campbell’s soup cans, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis, and Marilyn, followed soon after by the “disaster series,” which depicted race riots, car crashes, and the electric chair. Exhibitions in California and New York created quite a sensation, just as Warhol had hoped. Not only were these images an affront to abstraction, they were derived from boldly familiar images, accessible to people everywhere, drawn from supermarket shelves and tabloids. Referencing his own work as well as that of Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, and Tom Wesselmann, he explained: “The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” [2]

Once he latched on to a theme, Warhol developed it in series after series, inventively employing photo-silkscreens as prints in their own right or as the foundation for paintings on canvas in which he used polymer pigments. [3] Working with assistants in his studio—known as The Factory—Warhol embraced an assembly-line approach that produced vast quantities of artwork that brought him international attention and financial success.

The purchase of a sixteen-millimeter Bolex camera in 1963 set the ever-creative Warhol off in a new direction: underground films. Using his paintings and prints as sources of revenue, Warhol dedicated himself to filmmaking, another vehicle for attaining the fame that is usually associated with Hollywood. However, Warhol did not employ polished actors, nor carefully orchestrated scripts for his films. Rather, he used his friends, colleagues, and associates—many of whom frequented The Factory—as members of his casts. Often the films were long, repetitive, even tedious, and revolved around the world of The Factory and its permissive attitudes towards drugs and sex.

A turning point in Warhol’s career came in June 1968, when Valerie Solanis, the founder and only member of S.C.U.M., the Society for Cutting Up Men, shot him, and he nearly died. This episode gathered considerable press coverage and Warhol further exploited it by having his portrait—scars and all—painted by Alice Neel and photographed by Richard Avedon. After a lengthy recovery, he continued to make a few films, but in the early 1970s he returned to painting, emphasizing portraiture. He averaged between fifty and one hundred portraits a year, many commissioned by such world celebrities as Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Judy Garland, and Princess Caroline. He also made likenesses of Mao Tse-tung and Richard M. Nixon, but always claimed that he had no political agenda in doing so.

Throughout the seventies and until his death in 1987, Warhol kept a frenetic pace of exhibitions and international travel. He painted dollar signs and details of Renaissance masterpieces, and flirted with abstraction in his renditions of Rorschach tests and camouflage patterns. At the time of his death, he was working on a large-scale version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, interpreted by some as a return to his Catholic roots. Although he pursued fame his entire career, when he contemplated mortality, he wished otherwise: “When I die I don’t want to leave any leftovers. I’d like to disappear. People wouldn’t say he died today, they’d say he disappeared.” [4] Yet Warhol did not get what he hoped for; in 1988, more than ten thousand items, including art, jewelry, and crockery were sold at auction, and, in 1994, The Andy Warhol Museum opened in his home town, the largest museum in the United States dedicated to one artist.

Notes:

[1] Warhol quoted in Kasper Konig, Pontus Hulten, and Olle Granaths, eds., Andy Warhol (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968), unpaginated. Warhol, bored by the statement, later modified it: “In the future, fifteen people will be famous. In fifteen minutes, everyone will be famous.”

[2] Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 50, quoted in Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 461.

[2] See Marco Livingstone, “Do it Yourself: Notes on Warhol’s Techniques,” in McShine, ed., Andy Warhol, 63–78.

[3] Statement read by Nicolas Love at memorial mass for Warhol, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 1, 1987, quoted in McShine, ed., Andy Warhol, 466.