Andy Warhol

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Born: August 6, 1928

Died: February 22, 1987

Summary of Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was a famous magazine and ad illustrator who rose to prominence as a key figure in the Pop art movements of the 1960s. He experimented with a wide range of creative genres, including performance art, cinema, video installations, and writing, and he blurred the borders between fine art and common aesthetics in problematic ways. Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987.

Even before he started making work for galleries, Andy Warhol was the most successful and well-paid commercial illustrator in New York. Despite this, his screenprinted pictures of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and dramatic newspaper headlines became instantly associated with Pop art. He rose from the obscurity and poverty of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh to become a captivating magnet for bohemian New York and, eventually, a position in the High Society circles. For many, his rise mirrors one of Pop art’s goals: to bring common forms and topics into fine art’s elite salons.

Warhol’s early commercial illustration has lately been credited with teaching him how to influence public tastes. His paintings were frequently comical, colourful, and whimsical, in contrast to the cold and impersonal tone of his Pop art.

The famous screenprinted pictures with which Warhol earned his name as a Pop artist in the early 1960s are still the subject of much discussion. Some see his Death and Disaster series, as well as his Marilyn photographs, as candid expressions of his grief during public events. Others see them as early manifestations of ‘compassion fatigue,’ or the public’s loss of ability to sympathise with situations from which they are disconnected. Others see his images as screens that stand between us and terrifying occurrences, attempting to record and digest the shock.

Pop art constituted a significant new step in the split between high and low art forms, despite the fact that artists had relied on popular culture throughout the twentieth century. Warhol’s paintings from the early 1960s were significant in establishing these trends, but it is possible that his later actions were just as influential in broadening the scope of Pop art’s implications and further dissolving the boundaries between high art and popular culture.

Although Warhol continued to paint on occasion throughout his career, he “retired” from the medium in 1965 to focus on producing experimental films. Despite years of obscurity, these pictures have suddenly sparked considerable attention, and Warhol is now regarded as one of the period’s most significant filmmakers, a forefather of independent filmmaking.

Warhol’s career was generally seen to be on the decline when he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968. They have prioritised his early works over the activities that consumed his attention later in life, such as partying, collecting, publishing, and painting commissioned portraits. Nonetheless, others have come to believe that Warhol’s most important legacy is comprised of all of these endeavours since they foreshadow the varied interests, activities, and interventions that artists engage in today.

Childhood

Andy was born in a working-class Pittsburgh area to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents Ondrej and Ulja (Julia) Warhola. John and Paul were his two elder brothers. Andy was a bright and inventive youngster. At the age of nine, his mother, a casual artist herself, supported his creative desires by giving him his first camera. Warhol was known to suffer from a neurological condition that kept him at home for extended periods of time, and he would listen to the radio and collect photos of movie stars surrounding his bed during these times. He subsequently said that his early exposure to current events inspired his passion for pop culture and celebrities.

Early Life

Warhol attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) after graduating from high school at the age of 16 in 1945, where he got formal instruction in visual design. He came to New York City shortly after graduation, in 1949, to work as a commercial artist. His first assignment was an article for Glamour magazine called “Success is a Job in New York.” Throughout the 1950s, Warhol maintained a successful commercial illustration career, working for publications such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker. For local New York shops, he also created advertising and window displays.

Andy changed his name from Warhola to Warhol in the early 1950s and chose to go it alone as a professional artist. His most noteworthy work was influenced by his experience and competence in commercial painting, as well as his absorption in American popular culture. In 1952, he had his first solo display at the Hugo Gallery in New York, with Fifteen Drawings Based on Truman Capote’s Writings. He showed his work in a variety of locations across New York City, but most notably at the Museum of Modern Art, where he took part in his first group display in 1956.

Warhol began using ads and comic strips into his paintings in 1960. These paintings, which were loosely influenced by Abstract Expressionism, were distinguished by more expressive and painterly techniques with clearly visible brushstrokes, and were examples of early Pop art. However, later works, such as his Brillo Boxes (1964), would indicate a clear defiance of Abstract Expressionism by obliterating nearly all traces of the artist’s hand.

Mid Life

He began his most prolific phase in September 1960, after moving to a home at 1342 Lexington Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He had no specific studio space in his former flat, where he shared with his mother, but here he had plenty of space. He offered the Department of Real Estate $150 per month in 1962 to rent an old fire station on East 87th Street. He was given permission to utilise this property alongside his Lexington Avenue location until 1964.

His paintings in the early 1960s were largely based on illustrated imagery from printed media and graphic design, continuing the subject of ads and comic strips. Warhol used an opaque projector to expand the pictures onto a huge canvas on the wall to produce his enormous-scale graphic paintings. Then, working freehand, he’d transfer the picture onto the canvas using paint right on top of a pencil tracing. As a result, Warhol’s early 1961 paintings tend to be more painterly.

Warhol began work on his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings in late 1961. The majority of the works in the series were made by projecting source pictures onto canvas, tracing them with a pencil, and then painting over them. In this technique, Warhol was able to conceal the artist’s hand.

In 1962, Warhol began to experiment with silkscreening. This stencil method entailed transferring an image on a porous screen and then using a rubber squeegee to apply paint or ink. This was a new way of painting without leaving signs of his hand; similar to the stencil methods he used to produce the Campbell’s Soup Can images, it also allowed him to repeat the pattern several times over the same image, resulting in a serial image that suggested mass production. He would frequently start by laying down a layer of colours that would compliment the stencilled picture after it was placed.

His earliest silkscreen paintings were inspired by the front and back faces of dollar notes, and he went on to use this technique to produce many series of pictures of various consumer products and commercial things. Shipping and handling labels, Coca-Cola bottles, coffee can labels, Brillo Soap box labels, matchbook covers, and automobiles were among the items he portrayed. He began producing photo-silkscreen works in the autumn of 1962, which required transferring a photographic image onto porous silkscreens. Baseball (1962) was his first, and the ones after it frequently used mundane or disturbing images taken from tabloid newspaper pictures of automobile wrecks and civil rights protests, as well as money and consumer home items.

Warhol relocated to 231 East 47th Street, which he dubbed “The Factory.” in 1964. He was able to hire numerous helpers to help him execute his work because he had attained considerable success as an artist by this stage. This was a watershed moment in his career. With the aid of his helpers, he could now more firmly withdraw his hand from the canvas and generate repetitious, mass-produced pictures that appeared devoid of significance and begged the question, “What makes art, art?” Marcel Duchamp, whom Warhol idolised, was the first to propose this concept.

Warhol’s obsession with Hollywood lasted his whole life, as seen by his renowned pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. He also experimented with installations, most famously at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964, when he re-created Brillo boxes in their original size and then screenprinted their label designs onto plywood blocks.

In 1963, Warhol began working with cinema in order to continue his investigation of many mediums. After a trip to Paris for an exhibition of his work, he declared that he would be giving up painting to focus only on cinema two years later. Despite the fact that he never fully realised his ambition, he did make a number of films, the majority of which featured the Warholstars, a quirky and varied group of friends who attended the Factory and were recognised for their unorthodox lifestyle.

Between 1963 and 1976, he made nearly 600 films, ranging in length from a few minutes to 24 hours. In 1967, he began work on a project dubbed The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, or EPI. The EPI was a multi-media show that combined The Velvet Underground rock band with film, light, and dance projections, resulting in a sensory performance art experience. Warhol had been self-publishing artist’s books since the 1950s, but Andy Warhol’s Index, his first mass-produced book, was released in 1967. He went on to write many additional novels and co-found Interview Magazine in 1969 with his buddy Gerard Malanga.

Following an assassination attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas, a friend and radical feminist, in 1968, he sought to separate himself from his unusual entourage. The Factory scene of the 1960s came to an end at this point. Following that, Warhol sought for companionship among New York’s upper crust, and throughout the most of the 1970s, his work consisted of commissioned portraits based on printed Polaroid pictures. The most famous exception is his Mao series, which was created in response to President Richard Nixon’s visit to China. Critics perceived Warhol as prostituting his creative skill, and this later era as one of decline, because his portraits lacked the elegance and commercial appeal of his earlier works.

Late Life

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Warhol returned to painting, producing works that were usually abstract. The immediacy of the Abstract Expressionists and the rawness of Jackson Pollock’s drop paintings were mirrored in his Oxidation Painting series, which he created by peeing on a copper paint canvas. By the 1980s, Warhol had recovered much of his critical acclaim, thanks in part to his work with two much younger and more avant-garde artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. And, in the latter years of his life, Warhol moved to religious themes; his rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is especially well-known.

Warhol died on February 22, 1987, at the age of 58, following complications from a routine gall bladder surgery. In his hometown of Pittsburgh, he was laid to rest. More over 2,000 people attended his memorial ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Campbell’s Soup I

1968

The Abstract Expressionists’ extremely innovative and popular paintings of the 1940s and 1950s had become cliched by the 1960s, and the New York art scene was stuck in a rut. One of the artists who felt compelled to reintroduce images into his work was Andy Warhol. When Muriel Latow, a gallery owner and interior designer, proposed that Warhol paint things that people use every day, he came up with the concept of painting soup cans (it is rumoured that Warhol ate the soup for lunch every single day). From 1962 forward, he painted Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo boxes, and Coca-Cola bottles.

Warhol began his work as a consumer commercial designer and became highly successful. He utilised his trade expertise to produce a picture that is both instantly identifiable and aesthetically engaging. With the affluence of the era, consumer items and commercial imagery flooded the lives of Americans, and Warhol set out to discreetly reproduce that abundance using images found in advertising. He reproduced the sensation of shopping in a supermarket on canvas. As a result, Warhol is credited with inventing a new form of art that celebrated (while simultaneously criticising) his contemporaries’ and consumers’ consuming habits.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• Andy Warhol was a famous magazine and ad illustrator who rose to prominence as a key figure in the Pop art movements of the 1960s.
• He experimented with a wide range of creative genres, including performance art, cinema, video installations, and writing, and he blurred the borders between fine art and common aesthetics in problematic ways.
• Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987.
• Even before he started making work for galleries, Andy Warhol was the most successful and well-paid commercial illustrator in New York.
• Despite this, his screenprinted pictures of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and dramatic newspaper headlines became instantly associated with Pop art.
• He rose from the obscurity and poverty of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh to become a captivating magnet for bohemian New York and, eventually, a position in the High Society circles.
• For many, his rise mirrors one of Pop art’s goals: to bring common forms and topics into fine art’s elite salons.
• Warhol’s early commercial illustration has lately been credited with teaching him how to influence public tastes.
• The famous screenprinted pictures with which Warhol earned his name as a Pop artist in the early 1960s are still the subject of much discussion.
• Some see his Death and Disaster series, as well as his Marilyn photographs, as candid expressions of his grief during public events.
• Others see them as early manifestations of ‘compassion fatigue,’ or the public’s loss of ability to sympathise with situations from which they are disconnected.
• Others see his images as screens that stand between us and terrifying occurrences, attempting to record and digest the shock.
• Pop art constituted a significant new step in the split between high and low art forms, despite the fact that artists had relied on popular culture throughout the twentieth century.
• Warhol’s paintings from the early 1960s were significant in establishing these trends, but it is possible that his later actions were just as influential in broadening the scope of Pop art’s implications and further dissolving the boundaries between high art and popular culture.
• Although Warhol continued to paint on occasion throughout his career, he “retired” from the medium in 1965 to focus on producing experimental films.
• Warhol’s career was generally seen to be on the decline when he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968.
• They have prioritised his early works over the activities that consumed his attention later in life, such as partying, collecting, publishing, and painting commissioned portraits.
• Nonetheless, others have come to believe that Warhol’s most important legacy is comprised of all of these endeavours since they foreshadow the varied interests, activities, and interventions that artists engage in today.

Born: August 6, 1928

Died: February 22, 1987

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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