Introduction
Andy Warhol, Pop Artist or piece of Pop Art?
Many people believed Andy Warhol’s personality to be very plastic, fake and odd. Warhol constructed the image of a cold, manufactured person which he portrayed as himself to the public eye. Was this however his true personality or perhaps one of his most successful art performances? I intend to discuss how Warhol’s fascination with Hollywood had such a large influence on his work and his appearance. Warhol wanted his persona to become as plastic and manufactured as his mass produced works. He confined his daily wardrobe to black and white, so even when his photograph was printed he would be as easily recognisable as the black and white figure seen in public. A lot of the time Warhol had claimed that he wanted to be perceived as a machine,
“I think everybody should be a machine...The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine.”
(Swenson, 1963)
Warhol would play up to this idea in some interviews where he would act rather placid, asking the interviewer to answer the questions for him, giving one word answers, speaking through someone else, or just simply sitting quietly not answering at all.
“Why don’t you just tell me the words, they’ll just come out of my mouth”
(Interview with Andy Warhol, 1966 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0KxWkXoCzo)
Was Warhol truly as shy and introverted as he was perceived to be or did he construct the perfect image of Pop Art?
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
(Honnef, 1990, p.45)
Chapter One: The Creation of Andy Warhol.
Warhol began his life as Andrew Warhola, the son of Slovakian immigrants. He had always been...
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...ma that he worked so hard to create. Everything Warhol has ever saved from his life has been archived and goes through daily inspections to uncover new meanings for his art or hidden secrets about his infamous life, always without luck. If Warhol did have any secrets they were well covered up, he led his life like he always wanted living in the limelight, befriending the rich and famous getting his own “fifteen minutes of fame”. Is this the only life Warhol led however? At the end of each day when he was without his Superstars, did he take off his “Andy suit” and become Andrew Warhola again? Or did the lines between reality and fantasy become so blurred that the long term performance of Andy Warhol was the only life he lived? It can never be fully known if his persona of Andy Warhol was truly his identity or if in fact it was the greatest piece of Pop Art ever made.
Andy Warhol was a graphic artist, painter, and film maker, amoung other things, also associated with Pop Art. He moved to New York, around 1950, where he did his first advertisements as a comercial artist and, later, began showing in expositions. One technique employed by Warhol involved repeditive silk screen prints on canvas. He used this method to produce many series of prints with various, easily reconizable images. Between 1962 and 1964 in his self titled studio “The Factory”(Phaidon 484), Warhol produced over two thousand pictures. One of these, Lavender Disaster, was made in 1963 and belonged to a series of pictures all including the same image of an electric chair.
The earliest forms of art had made it’s mark in history for being an influential and unique representation of various cultures and religions as well as playing a fundamental role in society. However, with the new era of postmodernism, art slowly deviated away from both the religious context it was originally created in, and apart from serving as a ritual function. Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic and philosopher during the 1900’s, strongly believed that the mass production of pieces has freed art from the boundaries of tradition, “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependance on ritual” (Benjamin 1992). This particular excerpt has a direct correlation with the work of Andy Warhol, specifically “Silver Liz as Cleopatra.” Andy Warhol’s rendition of Elizabeth Taylor are prime examples of the shift in art history that Benjamin refers to as the value of this particular piece is based upon its mass production, and appropriation of iconic images and people.
Known for being the father of Pop Art, and a giant in pop culture, Warhol dominated the art scene from the late fifties up until his untimely death in 1987. However Warhol’s influence spread further then the art world, he also was a major player in the LGBT, avant-garde and experimental cinema movements. Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Slovakian immigrant parents, Warhol came from humble beginnings. Becoming widely known for debuting the concept of ‘pop art’ in 1962. Warhol’s reach grew further when he started experimenting with film, becoming a major player in the LGBT, avant-garde and experimental cinema movements. Warhol’s artist studio, known famously as ‘The Factory’ became a hub for experimentation, and a go-to point for celebrities, musicians and trans folk. During this time, Warhol came out as an openly gay man, challenging the status quo of the day, a time when being homosexual was illegal. While also producing highly experiential films such as ‘Blow Job’ (1964) and ‘Sleep’ (1964) which were highly political and provocative, at the time. As art critic Dave Hickey asserts, “Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganized society and creates constituencies of people around it” (Hickey, 2007), Andy Warhol’s art and lived experience created a political constituency which can be best recognised in the function of the “Silver Factory” on
...ded after his death, it was Artaud that claimed, “No, Van Gogh is not crazy, he was pushed to suicidal despair by a society which rejected his works.” Whether or not Artaud’s theory is correct, Vincent Van Gogh was in fact very ill and his paintings are famous for how lucid they are in illustrating the way his mental illness affected him. Van Gogh’s post-impressionist style is very unique of the late 19th century in France and most of his work was done with impasto technique as a way of expression. It is recognizable that his illness had a larger impact on his paintings’ subject matters than the style they were painted in. Vincent Van Gogh’s fame mostly came after his death, and while his paintings did help him to express himself, they now live on to visually translate the true, unwritten stories of his life and the effects paintings have with a mental illness.
Andy Warhol, (fig2) no one, including Warhol him self knows his exact birthday but its thought to be around 1928-1931. Born in Forest city Pennsylvania and christened Andrew Warhola (which he changed in 1949 while living in New York). There are several contradicting stories about his life although he left two autobiographies the factual authenticates are not known, however his parents emigrated to the States from Czechoslovakia in 1909, his father came first to avoid national service and his mother nine years later. His father who worked as a coal minor in West Virginia didn’t play a big role in brining up Warhol, as he was away form home allot. After his death Andrew his mother and his brothers had a very poor existence, during school holidays Andrew sold fruit and helped as a window...
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Each of the artists mentioned here met Andy Warhol at different phases of his career. While the majority of them were seen at the infamous Factory, some came both before and after. Regardless of where they met and knew Warhol, they each had their own individual lessons and impacts. Jean-Michel Basquait was perhaps the last artist to come around and really know Andy Warhol. Julia Warhol was certainly the first. In between were very many amazing artists, almost too many artists to talk about. The most important, of course, have been mentioned in this paper. Andy Warhol is a man still impacting art long after his death. His visionary style changed forever the face of both commercial art and gallery art. Hopefully this paper communicated a bit of that genius.
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“The painter paints his pictures with paint, and I do it with photographs.”- John Heartfield, 1967
Moffat, Charles. A. http://arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/popart/Andy-Warhol.html. November 2007. Web. 22 November 2013. The Art Story Foundation.
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