Andy Warhol

Background

Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928, in a working-class area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents Ondrej and Ulja (Julia) Warhola. John and Paul were his two older brothers. Andy was a bright and inventive child. At the age of nine, his mother, a casual artist herself, fostered his artistic desires by giving him his first camera. Warhol was known to suffer from a neurological ailment that kept him at home for lengthy periods, and he would listen to the radio and collect images of movie stars surrounding his bed during these times. He later said that his early exposure to current events impacted his fascination with pop culture and celebrities. When he was 14, his father died, leaving the family money to be used exclusively for higher education for one of the boys. The family thought that Andy would gain the most from a college education.

Warhol joined the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) after graduating from high school at the age of 16 in 1945. He traveled to New York City shortly after graduation, in 1949, to work as a commercial illustrator. His first assignment was for “Glamour Magazine,” where he wrote an article headlined “Success is a Job in New York.” Throughout the 1950s, Warhol maintained a successful commercial illustration career. With Fifteen Drawings Based on Truman Capote’s Writings, he had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in New York in 1952. He presented his work at a variety of venues in New York City, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art, where he took part in his first group show in 1956. Warhol took notice of new rising artists, particularly Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose work motivated him to broaden his artistic experimentation. He began his most prolific era in September 1960, after relocating to a townhouse at 1342 Lexington Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He had no specific studio space in his former apartment, which he shared with his mother, but now he had plenty of space to work. In 1962, he proposed to the Department of Real Estate $150 per month to rent a neighboring decommissioned fire station on East 87th Street. He was granted permission and operated this room alongside his Lexington Avenue site until 1964.

Keeping with the topic of commercials and comic strips, his paintings in the early 1960s were mostly based on illustrated imagery from printed media and graphic design. Warhol used an opaque projector to extend the images onto a big canvas on the wall to produce his enormous-scale graphic canvases. Working freehand, he would then outline the image with paint directly onto the canvas, without a pencil drawing underneath. As a result, Warhol’s early 1961 pieces are often more painterly. He began work on his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings in late 1961. The series used a variety of techniques, but the majority were created by projecting source photos onto canvas, outlining them with a pencil, and then painting over them. In this method, Warhol was able to conceal the majority of the artist’s hands.

In 1962, Warhol began experimenting with silkscreening. Transferring an image onto a permeable screen, then applying paint or ink using a rubber squeegee, was the stencil method. This was another method of painting while erasing signs of his hand; similarly to the stencil procedures he used to make the Campbell’s Soup Can images, this also allowed him to repeat the theme numerous times across the same image, producing a serial image reminiscent of mass production. His early silkscreen paintings were inspired by the front and back faces of dollar bills, and he went on to use this technique to produce several series of representations of various consumer goods and commercial items. In the autumn of 1962, he began making photo-silkscreen works, which involved copying a picture onto porous silkscreens. Baseball (1962) was his first, and the ones after it frequently used commonplace or horrific images culled from tabloid newspaper photographs of vehicle collisions and civil rights protests, as well as money and consumer household products. Warhol’s fascination with Hollywood lasted his entire life, as evidenced by his renowned portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. He also experimented with installations, most famously at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964, where he re-created Brillo boxes in their original size and then screen printed their label designs onto plywood blocks. In 1963, Warhol began working with film to continue his research of many mediums.

After an assassination attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas, a friend, and radical feminist, in 1968, he chose to separate himself from his unorthodox entourage. At this point, the Factory scene of the 1960s came to an end. Following that, Warhol sought company among New York’s upper crust, and for most of the 1970s, his work consisted of commissioned portraits based on Polaroid prints. His Mao series, which was developed in response to President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, is the most notable exception. Critics perceived Warhol as pimping his artistic talent, and his later phases as one of decline because his portraits lacked the beauty and commercial appeal of his earlier works. Warhol, on the other hand, considered financial success as a key goal.