Andy Warhols Art Mediums Andy Warhols Types of Art

These works rank
amidst the greatest portrait paintings
of the 20th century.

Green Car Crash (1963) is one of the world'southward
Summit 20 most expensive paintings.

CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
For other pictures similar those
produced by Andy Warhol, see:
Greatest 20th-Century Paintings.

MODERN PAINTERS
For more than artists like
Andy Warhol, see:
Modern Artists.

Introduction

The enthusiasm of Andy Warhol for the aesthetic of tv set, society newspaper columns, and fan magazines ran completely counter to the European model of the struggling avant-garde artist which the abstruse expressionists had followed. Warhol demanded wealth and fame, and he considered anybody who had them fascinating. As well as this, his "lipstick-and-peroxide palette" is, as Adam Gopnik has pointed out (New Yorker, April 10, 1989), "a totally original sense of colour which makes all previous American palettes wait European." Warhol's denial of any originality defined his artistic identity, and the fresh expect of his paintings - exploiting the latest commercial art techniques - validated it.

Part of Warhol's unique skill lay in his recognition that a person tin exist communicated via the media much more effectively than an art object can be, and he attempted to define his being entirely on the shallow airplane of reproducible images. In his 1968 exhibition catalogue for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, he wrote: "If you want to know all most Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings, and there I am. At that place's zilch more." From the early 1960s until his death in 1987, Warhol cleverly made utilise of both style and the media, and by so doing exposed the shallow values of gimmicky society with a frankness that was both subversive and way ahead of its time. He showed that all fame is equal and basically meaningless in a world of constantly changing imagery; his own public epitome may have been irresistibly glamorous, yet its shallowness also left a disturbing emotional void.

Note: Other Pop artists included: Alex Katz (b.1927), Ray Johnson (1927-95), Tom Wesselmann (b.1931), James Rosenquist (b.1933), Jim Dine (b.1935) and Ed Ruscha (b.1937).

Background

Warhol was born near Pittsburgh in 1928 into a family of Byzantine-Catholic working-class Slovakian immigrants. After taking a degree in graphic pattern from Carnegie Tech in 1949, he moved into an apartment in New York Urban center with his classmate Philip Pearlstein (b.1924) and quickly achieved success as a commercial artist. Warhol's New York Times drawings of shoes for Miller and Co brought him particular acclaim, and within a decade he was one of the best-paid commercial artists in the urban center, earning $65,000 a year. Warhol continued his career in graphic art until December 1962, but from the starting time he had individual aspirations to become a successful fine artist.

Stylistically, Warhol's attempts at fine art in the 1950s was closely related to his commercial piece of work in advert, and several of the methods and techniques from his commercial pattern practice predictable aspects of his later on fine fine art. For case, he hosted "colouring parties" to produce his advertisements and delegated several tasks to his mother, tactics he would repeat afterward in his extensive use of administration to manufacture his artwork. Similarly, his technique of drawing - or tracing pictures from magazines - on paper and then transferring them in wet ink onto a prepared background was repeated later in his adoption of silkscreen printing.

Characteristics of Warhol's Early on Pop Fine art

While several of Warhol'due south creative practices of the 1950s persisted in his later work, they can hardly be said to have led inevitably to the shocking directness with which he suddenly began to prefer a commercial art style in his painting at the end of 1959. Neither was there whatever precedent for his radical appropriation of subject field matter straight from the media for his large paintings of comic book images and newspaper ads (eg. Campbells Soup Can, 1962). According to Barry Blinderman (Modernistic Myths: An Interview with Andy Warhol, 1981), during the early sixties Warhol used a projector to transcribe and enlarge his sources with mechanical accuracy, and in his press statements he made a point of dismissing whatever originality in his work. Nevertheless he abased the comics every bit a subject from the moment he encountered Roy Lichtenstein's paintings of comics in the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1961, revealing a keen instinct for the need to create an original style.

Having decided on a subject thing - cheap ads, comics and headlines from the cheap tabloid papers - Warhol played effectually with various styles between 1960 and 1962. In some compositions he transcribed his sources in a loose mode complete with paint drips to give them the sort of expressive character found in gesture painting. At the aforementioned fourth dimension he created other images with hard, precise edges, a cold, mechanical style which he eventually settled on, calling them his "no comment" paintings.

Warhol enjoyed the mind-numbing not-selective mass-produced imagery promoted by media advertising. His fine art expressed and exalted the "sameness" of mass culture that the and then-called intellectuals involved in abstract expressionism abhorred. In his book The Philosophy of Whatsoever Warhol (1975), he said that what he liked nigh America was that its richest consumers purchase many of the aforementioned things as the poorest. "The president drinks Coke, Elvis drinks Coke - anyone and anybody drinks Coke. And no amount of money can purchase someone a better Coke because all the Cokes are the same.

Even and then, his pick of subjects was non random or arbitrary. Equally Kynaston McShine reveals in her publication Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (1989, MOMA, New York), many of his early images - "Wigs", "Where Is Your Rupture?", "Before and After" - apropos products promising bodily improvements in posture, hair, and bigger muscles, reflect Warhol's physical insecurities. Even Superman and Popeye, whom he painted in 1960-61, are characters that experience instant, physical transformations. McShine's interpretation is corroborated by Warhol's attempts to improve his advent in the 1950s, by wearing a silvery wig and having cosmetic surgery to reshape his olfactory organ in 1957.

Warhol did not take an exhibition of his popular paintings in New York until Eleanor Ward promoted them at the Stable Gallery in the autumn of 1962, though he did hang some of them (eg. Advertisement, Petty Male monarch, Superman, Before and Afterwards, and Saturdays Popeye) as a background to the fashion mannequins in a section store brandish he organized for Bonwit Teller in April 1961. It was Irving Blum of the Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles) who gave him his first gallery bear witness, in the fall of 1962: an installation of 30-two Campbell's Soup Cans, measuring 20 X 16 inches each. Warhol, always upwards to speed with the latest trend, may accept painted them every bit a response to the Painted Statuary Ale Cans (1960) of Jasper Johns, but they surpassed the Johns sculpture in the bland neutrality of their mass-produced state. The images are then irresistibly what they are; they are non cans of soup but images, divorcing the "signifier" from the "signified" more absolutely than almost whatever painting created up to that time. Although a few of Warhol's drawings of soup cans however retain a delicate, gestural quality as late as 1962, the thirty-two cans take no trace of expressive gesture or individuality.

Silkscreens: Eliminating the Artist'southward Touch

Warhol painted the cans and newspaper headlines of 1961 and 1962 past paw, but in belatedly 1962 he found out how to transfer a picture photographically onto a silkscreen and immediately switched to this technique, eliminating all traces of the artist's bear upon and producing a more mechanically detached picture. Moreover, he came increasingly to depend on assistants to create his paintings. In June 1963 he employed Gerard Malanga to piece of work total-time on the silkscreen paintings and gradually other administration joined the payroll. They operated like the staff in a graphic design office. When Warhol started work on his Marilyn Monroes, for case, Malanga and Billy Proper noun performed nearly of the work, similar cutting things and arranging the screens, while he walked along the rows asking questions similar "What color do y'all call back would be prissy?" Warhol made a deliberate point of his non-involvement, believing that someone else should be able to practice all his paintings for him. He claimed that the reason he used assistants and worked the way he did was because he wanted to be a auto and create a totally "neutral" look, devoid of any human being touch. However, the truth is he could easily have contracted out the chore if he had really wanted an authentically commercial look. As it was, he preferred to include the occasional man error, such as the misalignment of the screens, the uneven inking, and the intermittent smears.

Marilyn Monroes Lips (1962, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC) has the expect of an imperfect impress run, where the black line and the color screen do non quite fit together and the quality of inking varies widely. The banal repetition created by mass-market commercial processes seems to conflict with an (albeit passive) individual presence in both this painting and also Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962, Museum of Modern Art, NY). The repetition lends the images an anonymous, impassive appearance while specific features in each imperfectly fabricated unit manage to assert themselves, creating an awkward noise between the mechanical facade and the sense of the individual buried within it. Thus both the observer and the artist are reduced to being nothing more than passive voyeurs, experiencing life as an assembly line of mass-produced images.

Motion picture Star and Disaster Pictures: A Frightening Emptiness

The growing number of portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and other motion-picture show stars had agreat bargain to exercise with Warhol's enthusiasm for the glamour and glitter of Hollywood. In Andy Warhol (1968), his exhibition catalogue for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, he stated: "I honey Hollywood. It's beautiful. Everybody is plastic. I want to exist plastic." He was the ultimate fan, the ultimate consumer. Yet his "Marilyn Monroes" also take a nighttime side. They were fabricated following the extra'due south suicide in August 1962. What'south more, the mechanical repetition of her portrait makes her seem transparently superficial, denying her whatever sense of individuality beneath the surface paradigm. It constitutes a frightening depersonalization of a homo, and perhaps reflects the artist's own image of himself. As belatedly every bit 1975, for case, he wrote: "I am nevertheless haunted by the idea of looking into the mirror and seeing no one, nothing."

During TV coverage of a national tragedy like the suicide of Marilyn Monroe or the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy (all of which Warhol painted obsessively) the aforementioned video clips are played over and over for days on cease. Warhol's "Marilyns" and other multi-image portraits have the same anaesthetizing repetition.

In 1963 Warhol began work on a disaster series - for case, Sat Disaster (1964, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University - that further adult the morbid quality of the "Marilyns." He based the series on gruesome police and tabloid photographs of car crash victims, the electrical chair, and the diminutive flop. He reproduced the images in a diversity of colours and decorative patterns. These images are agonizing not only because of their horrifying explicitness, but too because Warhol's detachment suggests a horrible depersonalization: an emotional void reflecting the alienation of life in the sixties.

In 1962 and 1963 Warhol created several portraits of the Neo-Dada artist Robert Rauschenberg, whom he revered for having risen from poverty to fame. In a sense, the example of Rauschenberg exemplified Warhol's celebrated saying that 'in the hereafter everybody volition exist earth famous for 15 minutes.' Warhol was greatly attracted to the notion of glory every bit a sort of consumer product that anybody can possess.

The Factory (1963-67)

At the end of 1963 the Warhol studio was relocated to an quondam factory on East Forty-7th Street. "The Factory," as information technology came to exist known, graually evolved into place filled with chic fashion personalities and other "beautiful people", drag queens, along with members of the music underground, many of them occupied with drugs and/or bizarre behaviour. Warhol, it seemed, needed to be surrounded by oddities too as artists, by decadence and debauchery as well equally fine fine art. In whatever consequence, Warhol was yet producing in 1964. Indeed, looking back, many art critics are even so convinced that Warhol'south important work dates from 1960 through 1964.

By 1965 Warhol's growing fame was alluring other New York celebrities, who wanted to see and exist seen at The Factory. At the same time the media hounded Warhol, while visitors and hangers-on jostled for his attending. During the autumn of 1965, at the opening of Warhol's exhibition at the Constitute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, four thousand people sqeezed into two small rooms and staff had to remove the paintings off the walls for security. It was an art exhibition without art!

"I wondered what it was that had made all those people scream," Warhol afterwards recalled, in the book Popism (1980, Warhol & Hackett). "It was incredible to think of it happening at an art opening. But then, we weren't just at the art exhibit - we were the art showroom."

In 1966 The Factory crowd began to congregate in the evenings at a restaurant on Union Square known as Max'southward Kansas City. It was popular with artists and writers and its back rooms hosted a circus of exhibitionism, drugs, and sexuality. Celebrity visitors included Truman Capote, Bobby Kennedy, along with influential figures from the city'southward establishment also equally its Underground. Simply Warhol remained the goad: the presence that inspired or passively provoked people to live out their fantasies, while he watched or took photographs.

Ane of New York's most prestigious galleries of postmodernist art was owned by Leo Castelli. Warhol had ever wanted to take a solo prove there (Roy Lichtenstein had had ane there in 1962), and Castelli finally gave him one in 1964. His first show, was of the "Flowers" in which Warhol moved farther away from naturalism in his palette - not that his earlier works were in whatsoever strong sense naturalistic, but he tended either to use a scale of values that corresponded to nature, or a more artificial calibration with at least a residual resemblance. From 1964, he began to incorporate wholly not-naturalistic colours in his palette: for example, painting turquoise and pink "Campbell's Soup Cans" instead of red and white ones and creating multi-tone "Self Portraits" with a blue confront and yellowish hair.

Past 1966, having become New York's leading fine art celebrity of the sixties, with an exhibition in the most stylish gallery, Warhol was condign bored with painting and nigh stopped, preferring to focus on promoting a psychedelic, multi-media performance called "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable," featuring the stone band Velvet Hush-hush. He also turned increasingly to pic, shooting The Chelsea Girls (1966), the beginning financially successful, if supremely irksome, hole-and-corner film. This was followed past a number of appalling films that failed totally to justify their creative billings. This was no surprise, since his early films were uncompromisingly Warholesque in their passivity. All he did was simply to point the camera at someone and let it run, there was no sound track, as in his 6-hour, actionless movie entitled Slumber (1963). In Eat (1963) the camera focuses continuously for 45 minutes on popular artist Robert Indiana as he devours a mushroom. In Empire (1964) the camera focuses rigidly for viii hours on the summit of the Empire Country Building.

Creative Decline

In 1967 The Factory moved to 33 Union Foursquare West and the scene became more and more than weird until June 1968 when Warhol was shot and seriously wounded past a groupie Valerie Solanas, who had a minor role in one of his films. The carnival atmosphere concluded abruptly. Warhol was pronounced expressionless on the operating table but luckily revived. Later spending viii weeks in hospital he returned to The Factory a frightened man. Despite his fear that he might lose his creativity without the stimulus of carnival-type chaos around him, access to the studio was tightened. The Manufacturing plant full-bodied on mass-producing fine art that would sell: that is, commercial souvenirs of the avant-garde that Warhol called "Concern Art.

In fact, Warhol's artworks had been produced using assembly-line methods since 1963 - during the mid-60s The Mill manufactured up to eighty silkscreen paintings per day day and at one point a film every calendar week. In any issue, by mid-1969, Warhol's art had largely dried upwards. Every bit Brigid Polk, one of Warhol's studio assistants, was quoted as saying: "I've been doing information technology all for the last year and a one-half. Andy doesn't do art anymore. He'southward bored with information technology." It was truthful, largely. Warhol had turned his attention to other enterprises such as Interview, his high-society gossip magazine.

New Portraits

During the early 1970s Warhol rekindled his interest in painting with a series of lodge portraits and pictures of the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong - eg. Mao (1973, Art Institute of Chicago). By now, Warhol had go an internationally known artist-celebrity - the near talked-almost artist later Picasso, and a regular invitee at A-list social occasions and cultural events. As the Vietnam endgame began to unfold, alongside the political and criminal revelations of Watergate, both the very rich and the counterculture protest motility concerned themselves with symbols. Warhol'southward paintings of Chairman Mao amused wealthy art collectors while at the same fourth dimension confirming the ascendancy of Western capitalism by transforming the iconic champion of the world revolution into a consumer production for the rich.

More than portrait paintings appeared. Indeed, Warhol's gild silkscreen portraits of the seventies revitalized the genre of portrait art. Many were printed onto prepared grounds of textural brushwork in a standard format of two 40 X xl-inch panels, and many of the subjects took on the appearance of dimensionless, plastic objects.

What is Existent?

In the seventies and eighties, Warhol took on more advert and design commissions. He even became a consumer product himself, when he was featured in the 1986 Christmas catalogue for Neiman-Marcus: it advertised a portrait session with Warhol at a cost of $35,000. Warhol's intensifying association with condition and coin exploited the superficiality and materialism of American consumer culture in the 70s and 80s, as individuals everywhere began to feel more alienated with the unreality of life. As the artist himself admitted: "I don't know where the artificial stops and the existent starts." A sad admission from the loftier priest of pop fine art, who made a career out of revealing the "truth" about modernistic society.

Pop Art paintings and drawings by Andy Warhol tin be seen in many of the world's best galleries of gimmicky art and in the best fine art museums around the globe.

• For biographies of other modern artists, see: Famous Painters.
• For more details of painting, see: Homepage.

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