Andy Warhol

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Mark B. Pohlad

Andy Warhol was the most renowned Pop artist in the 1960s and, more generally, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. His boundless and apparently effortless creativity expressed itself in many forms. He was a commercial designer, painter, printmaker, filmmaker, and publisher.

Although Warhol was intentionally obscure about his background, he was born Andrew Warhola, the son of a Czech Roman Catholic emigrant miner, in remote Forest City, Pennsylvania. After his father's early death, Warhol enrolled in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Technology as an art student in 1946. At this time he worked as a window decorator in a Pittsburgh department store. By 1950 he had shortened his name to Andy Warhol, and had moved to New York where his reputation as a designer quickly blossomed. Besides doing graphic work for magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, he won awards for his advertising designs, particularly those for I. Miller shoes. It is clear that had he never become a fine artist, he would nevertheless have been one of the most important designers in the postwar period. It was during these years Warhol dyed his hair the signature silver color that he would maintain for the rest of his life.

In 1960, the year Warhol began to paint, he made some of the earliest works that could be called Pop Art. His large paintings of Dick Tracy could be seen in Lord and Taylor's store windows on Fifth Avenue. Warhol's position as the leading Pop artist was consolidated in 1962 at the seminal "New Realists" exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. After 1964, Warhol was represented by the New York dealer Leo Castelli, who also handled most of the other Pop artists.

Warhol quickly became notorious for his paintings of Campbell's Soup cans, which were first exhibited at Los Angeles' Ferus Gallery in 1962. These paintings were straightforward renderings of row upon row of soup cans. Not just publicity gambits, these were important avant-garde works, signaling a major change in the nature of art. They were a cool reaction to the passionate--and to the Pop artists' minds, excessive--art of the Abstract Expressionists, which then dominated the art scene. The soup cans were painted in the same spirit as Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" (objects designated as artworks merely by the artist's choice and recontextualization). Warhol was forced to defend the paintings as legitimate artworks when the Campbell Soup Company sued the him for copyright infringement. The corporation later decided that the paintings were good advertising. In 1963, inspired by the objects he had seen in supermarkets, Warhol precisely imitated Brillo soap-pad boxes. He had one-hundred wooden boxes constructed by a carpenter and stenciled the sides with exact imitations of the Brillo graphic. For sale at three hundred dollars each, these created great excitement when they were exhibited at Manhattan's Stable Gallery the following year. When they were to be shown in a Toronto art gallery, their status as art was ignored. Warhol's dealer had to pay "merchandise duty" to have them delivered.

With works like these Warhol had abandoned painting by hand for other more anonymous techniques (such as photo-silkscreen). "I want to be a machine," he said in 1962, subverting the idea of the artist as an expressive medium who creates unique, handmade works. Warhol used Marilyn Monroe as a motif in several silk-screened works in the 1960s (as in Gold Marilyn Monroe [1962, The Museum of Modern Art, New York]). Rendered in the cheap-looking, off-register style of trashy reproduction, these artworks suggested that Marilyn's manufactured persona had overwhelmed her identity as a person. Celebrities became a major theme in Warhol's works. Throughout the next two decades he made images of athletes, politicians, and entertainers such as Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Chairman Mao. As in the Marilyn images, the colors were often garish and silk-screened off-register. A series from this period is entitled Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century. Warhol's fascination with stars was reflected in the gossipy celebrity magazine he founded in 1969 entitled Inter/View, then Andy Warhol's Interview, and later simply Interview.

In response to the civic strife of the 1960s, Warhol created his Disaster series. Such works as Car Crash, Race Riot, and Electric Chair involve the stark appropriation of newspaper photographs saturated with color and often repeated within the same frame. Warhol suggested that in these works he wished to demonstrate how the callous repetition of the media's coverage of traumatic events creates a numbing apathy in viewers.

In 1964 Warhol established his "Factory," a rented attic that became a large mass-production studio in New York where assistants made works serially. It was responsible for turning out thousands of Warhol's works. Often, Warhol would clip photos from magazines and newspapers and have them silk-screened by his assistants. The very name "factory" challenged the notion of an artist's studio as a place of inspiration, a place where unique and precious pieces are made. In this spirit, Warhol once said that anybody "should be able to do all my paintings for me." The Factory became nearly as notorious for its denizens as the art that was produced there. Robert Hughes described its silver-papered walls as a place where "cultural space-debris, drifting fragments from a variety of Sixties subcultures (transvestite, drug, S & M, rock, Poor Little Rich, criminal, street, and all the permutations) orbiting in smeary ellipses around their unmoved mover." Shy and inhibited himself, Warhol became a voyeur of a subculture of his own creation. In his role as funky entrepreneur Warhol opened a nightclub with the thoroughly 1960s-sounding name "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable," whose house-band was The Velvet Underground. Its leader, Lou Reed, is now regarded as a soulful guru of heroine culture and musically a pioneer of Punk and New Wave.