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Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, August
6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.. Died February 22, 1987, at the
New York Hospital after gallbladder surgery. He was the founder and major
icon of the POP ART movement. After graduating from Carnegie Institute of
Technology in 1949, he moved to Manhattan. He established himself as
a commercial artist and illustrator and by the mid fifties had become the
icon of commercial art in New York.
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From 1960 to 1962, Warhol
went from depicting enlarged comic strip images in a storefront display to
replicating commercial images, starting with the "Campbell's Soup" cans.
He said, "Pop Art is for everyone!" and chose the symbols of
American mass culture as his subjects.
"From then on, most of Warhol's best work was
done over a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with
information, where most people experience most things at second or third
hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and
disassociated by repeated again and again and again, there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can
be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Warhol worked this
out; he didn't have to. He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a
sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity - the famous
image of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced both
sacredness and solidity. Earlier artists, like
Monet, had
painted the same motif in series in order to display minute
discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to
hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye
and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind.
They are about sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same
size, same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the condition
of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much
more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper
Johns' pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness, this
fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became the key to
Warhol's work; it is there in the repetition of stars' faces (Liz, Jackie,
Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the condition of being
an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image
overload in a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk
screen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print:
those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general
graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand
but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy..."
- From
"American Visions",
by Robert Hughes
Later in the 1960s,
Warhol made a series of experimental
films dealing with
such ideas as time, boredom, and repetition; they include Sleep (1963),
Empire (1964), and The Chelsea Girls (1966). In 1965 he started working
with a rockband called
"The Velvet Underground"
formed by Lou Reed and John Cale. Andy introduced them to the model and
moviestar
Nico and she sang
on their debut album from 1967 "The Velvet Underground and Nico". Andy
would travel around the country, not only with The Velvets, but also with
superstar of the year
Edie Sedgwick and
the lightshow "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable".
On June 3rd, 1968,
Valerie Solanis, a
rejected superstar, came into The Factory and shot Andy three times in the
chest. He was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead, but after
having his chest cut up and been given heart massage, he survived. Valerie
Solanis turned herself in that night and was put in a mental institution.
She was later given a three year prison sentence. After recovering Andy
Warhol continued to work. He founded INTERVIEW magazine
in 1969 (they changed the name to Interview in 1971), published The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again in 1975 and
continued to paint portraits until his death in 1987. |
