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Andy Warhol (1930-1987)

Born on September 28, 1930 in Forest City, PA, to Czechoslovak parents, Andrew Warhola (shortened to Warhol in the 1950's) attended primary school in the Pittsburgh area. In 1945, after graduation from high school, he studied pictorial design and art history at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. In 1949 he graduated and moved to New York to begin his career as a commercial illustrator.

Warhol's first work was for Glamour magazine for an article entitled "Success in New York is a Job." Then came work for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines and his first art for I. Miller shoe company. (It is said that Warhol developed a fetish for shoes during the I. Miller work, supported by the admission of friends of Warhol and their accounts of his licking their shoes!!) By 1955 he was the most successful and influential commercial artist in New York. He became a workaholic, devoting all his time to work and doing several versions of every assignment in every possible version. He was quoted: "The reason I'm painting this way is because I want to be a machine."

For a man who is today credited with founding and being the most influential figure of the Pop Art movement, his first public recognition came in an unusual way. He dressed windows for department stores, and in them he used enlarged comic strip images--characters such as Superman, Dick Tracy and Popeye--that he incorporated into designer fashion. Needless to say, his store windows drew a lot of attention and garnered him a reputation for the uncommon.

As he turned from the prevailing abstract-expressionist style to hard-line realism, his popularity skyrocketed. Initially, all images were hand painted but he later began to do silkscreening. This afforded him a production level that was quick and cheap. Iconographic images such as his famous soup cans, U.S. dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles and dozens of faces of famous celebrities are now legend. These were the golden years for advertising art. While Warhol's art was accelerating in popularity, his personality and appearance took on new dimensions. He began to wear an ill-fitting blond wig and changed his speech and mannerisms.

In the 1960's, Warhol experimented with the medium of film, creating several cult classics such as Chelsea Girls, Empire, and Blow. He founded Interview magazine and published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again while continuing to produce silkscreens. In 1964 he began making sculpture, often with labels from supermarkets, and in the 1970's he turned to portraits, two of the most famous being Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. These images reflected his fascination with the topic of death, something he carried into a series called "Death and Disaster" that included depictions of car crashes and gang warfare.

In 1968, so inflamed by his art and personality, Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) entered Warhol's loft and shot the artist. The wound was nearly fatal. It also marked a gradual turn away from painting and more involvement in film, TV and publication.

In the 1980's Warhol continued his "Death and Disaster" series silkscreens with showings throughout the world. In 1982, at a peak of popularity and recognition, he created two cable television shows and in 1986, Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes for MTV. Later in 1986, at the opening of a show in Milan, he was stricken with severe pain. Warhol was diagnosed with a gallbladder condition that had been ignored because of his dread of hospitals. Surgery was scheduled and he was admitted into New York Hospital on February 21, 1987. Surgery went well, but the private nurse attending Warhol following surgery failed to administer medication or notice his deteriorating condition. Within hours of successful surgery he was in trauma. On February 22, Warhol was pronounced dead.

With Warhol's passing, the art world suffered a major loss. His personal style will always move forward, touching and changing people's lives. Warhol was one of a kind. His art served as a reminder for us to notice what is around us, the simplicity and the beauty that is found in common objects and images.

Warhol was an enigma, a man of many facets. From the place of his birth, which he wanted people to think was McKeesport or Hawaii (the birth certificate says Forest City just the same), to his extreme behavior, he is a challenge to comprehend. His upbringing in rough, coal-mining towns with black skies and abject poverty and crime probably laid the groundwork for personality difficulties. It also might explain his late-life fascination with death. The family's difficulties with low income and the living conditions they initiated made Warhol's childhood erratic.

Warhol's work is like none other. His art brought common day people together and showed the impact of contemporary society and the idea of mass media on values. In 1999, ARTnews named him one of the twenty-five most influential artists - ever. It was written: "It all began with the first Campbell's soup can in 1962...With this simple image, the concept of appropriation was let loose for good. Warhol's celebration of his screen sirens, hustler hunks, and café-society wanna-bes...had an equally dramatic effect."

In May 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh. It is the most extensive display of his work anywhere in the world.

Warhol on Exhibit

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents Andy Warhol Retrospective through August 18. It spans the entire career of the artist and brings together approximately 200 works from the early 1940's through 1986, including examples from such landmark series as Campbell's Soup Cans, Marilyn, Jackie, Mao, Flowers, Disaster and Self-Portraits. Also included are early drawings and the first groundbreaking hand-painted B/W works of the early '60s. This is the only U.S. venue for this exhibition, and there is timed-ticketing.

An Andy Warhol Workshop will be held on July 27 at 9:00 a.m. for families with children ages 7 and up. Admission is free, but reservations are required and limited to 50 people. For info, call 213.621.1712.

Warhol Stamp to Debut

The U. S. Postal Service will continue its celebration of the fine arts by paying tribute to Andy Warhol with the release of a postage stamp scheduled for August 6. The stamp art features his "Self Portrait, 1964." Based on a photo-booth photograph, the image of silkscreen ink and synthetic polymer paint on canvas is one of several versions in varying colors and is in the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum. A detail of a photograph taken by Factory photographer Billy Name entitled "Andy with Self-Portrait, 1967" appears on the selvage.

Copyright ARTtalk Vol. 12 No. 9 -- July 2002