Andy Warhol 1928-1987

Andy Warhol’s life as an artist and his extensive and multi-faceted body of work, undoubtedly had the strongest impact on culture, art and the understanding of the role of artists in society worldwide. He did not single-handedly create the Pop-Art movement, but he surely became its most prominent representative. Not only through his art, but also through his pointed comments on American consumerist society and his extraordinary appearance, Warhol became the leading figure of the art world of his time. His invention of the Factory as a place where art was created, a diversity of people gathered and anything could happen, was a whole new apporach to the function of an artist’s studio.

Andy Warhol, born as Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928 into a family of Slavic immigrants, did not come from a prosperous background. His father was a labourer, often away on building sites, while his mother, left alone with Andy and his two older brothers, did everything to make ends meet. A turning point in his childhood came, when he contracted scarlet fever, which resulted in a neurological illness associated with spasms and other serious difficulties. The illness changed the little boy, forcing him to spend long periods in bed and also separated him from the company of others. It was his mother, Julia Zavacka, who encouraged her sickly child to get involved into art and who understood his developing fascination with comic books, cinema and celebrities. She continued to be a major influence during Warhol’s whole life. 

During his teenage years Andy Warhol’s exceptional talent in drawing became more and more apparent. He enrolled at Carnegie Institute for Technology the age of seventeen and studied graphic design and painting. After graduating, Warhol moved to New York to pursue a successful career as a commercial artist. 

In the Post-Modern era, starting with the 1950s, two opposing cultural movements emerged as a result of a booming consumerist society and the ever-growing multitude of mass-produced commodities. One movement, following the ideas of the Frankfurt school of philosophers, rejected consumerism and was reflected in art by the development of Minimalism. The other movement, resulting in Pop-art, had a fundamentally different approach. Pop-artists, with Andy Warhol among the first ones, embraced mass-produced urban culture and tore down the distinction between so called “High Art” and popular culture. Andy Warhol spearheaded the revolution. By taking commercial products like the Brillo Box out of their usual context and setting them up in an exhibition space, he elevated completely ordinary everyday objects into objects of art. Highlighting the visual attractiveness of branded products, for example in his famous series of Campbell Soups, his works can be seen as a comment on commodity fetishism.

His introduction of screen printing techniques into his working process, mirrored the production of mass produced packaging of products and was in stark contrast with the traditional view on art as something produced by the artists hand. Repetition and seriality became dominant themes in his work. 

Andy Warhol also started to produce celebrity portraits in vivid colours. His most famous subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Mao Tse-tung. Warhol used pre-existing photographs from magazines, for example the publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe from the film Niagara or Mao Tse-tung’s portrait from the cover of the “Little Red Book”, an anthology of Mao’s quotations. Mao, Warhol’s first non-American subject, was made in 1972, the same year that President Richard Nixon visited China. As the first series of Mao prints was presented at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1972, the press didn’t even mention it. It was a sign of fading interest in Warhol at the time, who after his brilliant Flowers series starting in 1964, turned to producing art, that was extremely difficult to sell. Even though the films he made in the years after the Flowers can be seen as milestones in cinematography, they did not appeal to the public due to their extremely experimental nature. So when the first Mao prints were presented, always in sets of ten with variations in colour and linework, in an edition of 250, no one expected the major success and the fame the whole series would garner. The printing technique of the Mao sets differed from what Andy Warhol had done before. The sets were produced in a complex multiscreen printing process in order to make the surface resemble the qualities of rough handpainting. The heavy inking of the prints added texture to the surfaces, making them look partially embossed. The controversiality of Warhol’s bold choice of Mao Tse-tung as a subject for his art played itself out on many levels. Mao Tse-tung, trying to be the impersonation of Anti-Capitalism, became the subject of commercialization through the sales of Warhol’s prints. This was only one aspect of the paradox, of which Andy Warhol was very much aware. The high visibility of his Mao series in the U.S. depicting a persona non grata, the sheer colourful presence of a portrait, that was initially published in the “Little Red Book” in celebration of the same person, was another part of the contradiction. 

Warhol’s ability to take an iconic cultural symbol, relocate it from its context and bring out the essence of its meaning, is once again evident in his famous Dollar Sign series of the early 1980s. His fascination with the theme started much earlier, his family background of poverty being often cited as the reason money became so significant for Warhol. His first iteration of making money into art in 1962, was also the first instance Warhol used the screen-printing technique for his work. By printing multiples of hand drawn Dollar bills in his studio, he chose an object that signified desire, reproduced it in his own unique style, in order to again make money out of it by selling his art. The later Dollar Sign series was first exhibited at Leo Castelli’s Greene Street Gallery in 1982. It became one of the most instantly recognisable of Warhol’s themes, reflecting a complete synthesis of art and money within his œuvre. The whole series is based on hand drawings on paper, with many different variations of the Dollar sign, which Warhol created in his studio. He then transferred some of these drawings onto silk-screen and printed them in typically strong Pop-Art colours. 

His crass statements about his infatuation with money and the relationship of commerce and art were shocking and left room for ambivalence. Utterly self-reflective, Andy Warhol was on one hand fully aware of the trappings of  commodity culture but on the other hand admitted to revel in it. In one instance he said: “American money is very well-designed, really. I like it better than any other kind of money. I’ve thrown it in the East River down by the Staten Island Ferry just to see it float.”

Another important aspect that shaped his whole life and art was his homosexuality, which obviously at the time was not accepted by conservative society. His forwardness in depicting sexual scenes, especially of the male body, and portraits of men in drag was courageous in a time were homophobia was the accepted stance. Andy Warhol, who was very self-aware and always conflicted about the appearance of his body, sought to counteract the dissatisfaction with his looks. Afflicted by a depigmentation of his skin and hair-loss, he worked out and started to wear the shock-of white-hair wig, which became his trademark and shaped his image.

Warhol was also conscious of a younger generation whose re-engagement with popular culture, riffs on graffiti, and New York East Village background intrigued him. In 1981 Warhol met Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, who would collaborate with Warhol on paintings. According to Basquiat, Warhol would begin the paintings with “something very concrete, like a newspaper headline or product logo, and then I would sort of deface it.” Depending on the work, this process could continue for two or three rounds, until a balance was reached between

Warhol’s hand-painted images and Basquiat’s abstract gestures, text, numbers, and pictographs. Warhol was attracted to the expressive immediacy of the younger generations artistic approach, which in part triggered his return to making new work with the hand-painted technique he had used pre-silkscreen.
 

Few other artists have shaped the role of art in society like Andy Warhol. The instant recognizability of his art, his flamboyant lifestyle and cultivated persona still continue to have a huge impact on culture, media and art today. His work is part of the most prominent art collections in the world, numerous retrospectives and solo exhibitions in important museums, including the Whitney Museum, the MoMa and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London and many others, are testament to his lasting legacy and significance. 

Andy Warhol died in 1987 in New York.