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Andy Warhol

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File:Helmut Newton- Andy Warhol.jpg
Andy Warhol, photographed by Helmut Newton.

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American painter, filmmaker, publisher, actor, and a major figure in the Pop Art movement.

Biography

Warhol was born as Andrew Warhola in Forest City, Pennsylvania. His parents, Ondrej (Andrew) Warhola (original surname was Varchola, he changed it after coming to US) and Júlia Zavacká, were working class immigrants of Ruthenian ethnicity from Miková, in northeast Slovakia; his father worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. The family was Catholic. In the third grade, he came down with a strange disease called St. Vitus' dance, which is a virus of the nerves and thought to be a complication of scarlet fever. This disease changed his looks, and his life, forever.

Warhol showed early artistic talent and studied commercial art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 1949, he moved to New York City and began a successful career in magazine illustration and advertising. He became well-known mainly for his whimsical ink drawings of shoes done in a loose, blotted style.

Campbell's Soup Can 1968

In the 1960s, Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola. He switched to silkscreen prints, seeking not only to make art of mass produced items, but to mass produce the art itself. He said that he wanted to be like a robot. He hired and supervised "art workers" engaged in making prints, shoes, films, books and other items at his studio, The Factory, located on Union Square in New York City. Warhol's body of work furthermore includes commissioned portraits and commercials.

A lot of Warhol's works revolve around the concept of Americana and American culture. He painted money, food, women's shoes, celebrities, newspaper clippings, and everyday objects. To him, these subjects represented American cultural values. For instance, Coca-Cola represented democratic equality because, quote:

"What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

He used popular imagery and methods to visualize the American cultural identity of the 20th century. This popular redefinition of American culture is a theme and result of Warhol's art. Because American culture has had great international influence, Warhol did, as well.

Outside of the art world, Andy Warhol is best known for the quote, "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." He later told reporters, humorously, "My new line is, 'In fifteen minutes, everybody will be famous.'"

Socialite and Recluse

Warhol used to socialize at Serendipity and Studio 54, nightclubs in New York City. He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and as a meticulous observer. More than one person jokingly referred to him as "death warmed over."

Warhol was openly gay, rare for celebrities of his stature at the time. Many people think of Warhol as asexual and as merely a voyeur, but these notions have been debunked by biographers like Fred Guiles, scholars like Richard Meyer, personal accounts of relationships by ex-lovers such as Jed Johnson and Billy Name, and by the overtly campy and homoerotic nature of his work itself. Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works (portraits of Liza Minelli, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and films like "My Hustler", "Blow Job", and "Lonesome Cowboys") draw from gay underground culture and/or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. In fact, many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters. The first works that he submitted to a gallery in the pursuit of a career as an artist were, in fact, homoerotic drawings of male nudes. They were rejected for being too openly gay.

A meticulous collector, he organized almost every piece of paper, fan mail—after taking off the stamps—and magazine related to his fame along with personal notes, gay pornography and found artifacts into hundreds of numbered boxes and set them aside, never to open them again. Warhol referred to these boxes as his "time capsule". Many exist today and are available for research at his Pittsburgh museum. Warhol's house was filled to the brim with his collected art, artifacts, and Americana.

Many of his later commissioned portraits were a direct or indirect result of this networking. As a famous artist, Warhol and his Factory attracted and facilitated many "groupies" and friends that Warhol would include in films and happenings. Warhol promoted these factory regulars to fame, creating the Warhol superstars. They would appear in and help him make his work, play in his movies, write his books, hang out and generally become his following.

When Warhol was asked to give a series of university lectures that he didn't feel like doing, one of his friends put on a wig and white make-up, and pretended to be him by sitting quietly on the stage. Other Superstars explained Warhol's work to the audience, and urged them to drop out of college. The University eventually found out Warhol's "fraud" and the following dispute had to be settled with a refund.

Warhol would regularly volunteer at the homeless shelters in New York, particularly during the busier times of the year. He described himself as a religious person, although not fully accepted by religion because of his homosexuality. Many of his later works contain almost hidden religious themes or subjects, and a body of religious-themed works was found posthumously in his estate.

Shooting

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a Factory regular, entered Warhol's studio and fired three shots at Warhol, nearly killing him. Although the first two rounds missed, the third passed through Warhol's left lung, spleen, stomach, liver, esophagus, and right lung. Solanas then turned the gun on a companion of Warhol, Mario Amaya, injuring his thigh. Warhol survived his injuries, but he never fully recovered. Earlier, Solanas had given a script to Warhol, in hopes that he would make a film out of it. Warhol never did. Apparently, she had visited the Factory earlier in the day to ask that they give the script back to her. It had, however, been lost. She later explained that she had attacked Warhol because, "he had too much control over [her] life." The story of Valerie Solanas was made into the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol, starring Lili Taylor and directed by Mary Harron.

In the hospital, his doctors had already declared him deceased, after which he was resuscitated. Warhol later joked that he was now invulnerable, since he had gone through death and came out alive. The shooting and Warhol's "death" received wide media coverage.

One of Warhol's associates, Paul Morrissey, later satirized the event in his movie "Women In Revolt", calling a group similar to Solanas' S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men), P.I.G. (Politically Involved Girls).

In 1990 Lou Reed recorded the album Songs for Drella (one of Warhol's nicknames was Drella, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella) with fellow Velvet Underground alumnus John Cale.

Warhol had adopted Reed's band the Velvet Underground as one of his projects in the 1960s, "producing" their first album The Velvet Underground and Nico as well as providing the album art, widely regarded as some of the greatest album art of all time. The album itself is also regarded as one of the greatest (and most influential) albums in rock history. After the band became successful Warhol and band leader Reed started to disagree more and more about the direction the band should take, and the contact between them faded. On Drella, Reed apologizes and comes to terms with his part in their conflict.

Death

Warhol died in New York City following routine gallbladder surgery at the age of 58. Warhol was afraid of hospitals and doctors, so he had delayed having his recurring gall bladder problems checked.

He is interred at St. John the Baptist Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, south of Pittsburgh. Fellow artist Yoko Ono was among the speakers at his funeral.

Andy Warhol had so many posessions it took Sotheby's nine days to auction his estate after his death for a total gross amount of over 20,000,000 (USD).

Work

Paintings

File:Warhol-Marilyns.jpg
Marilyns

When he decided to pursue a career as an artist, Warhol had already established a reputation as a commercial illustrator. In school he had made paintings, but his work afterwards had mainly consisted of "blotted ink" illustrations for warehouses and magazines. He felt that he was not being taken seriously as an illustrator, and wanted to become a "re=al" artist.

When he started painting, he looked to find a niche for himself. At that time Pop Art--as it was later to be called--was already experimented with by several artists turning away from abstract expressionism, and Warhol turned to this new way of making art, where popular subjects could be part of the artist's vocabulary. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, in a hand-painted style, with paint drips. He added these drips to give his paintings a "serious" feel, to emulate a bit of the style of the abstract expressionists, that were en vogue at the time, in other words to be taken seriously or to sell his paintings, which may have had the same meaning to Warhol.

To Warhol, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons were already being "done" by Roy Liechtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns, et-cetera; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends suggested that he should paint the things he loved the most. In his signature way of taking things literally, for his first major exhibition he painted his famous cans of Campbell's Soup, that he had for lunch most of his life. Warhol loved money, so he later painted money. He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well.

From these beginnings he developed his later style and themes. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the hand-made from the artistic process. Warhol went from painting to silk-screening, his later drawings were traced from slide projections. In other words, Warhol went from being a painter to being a designer of paintings. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, in different versions and variations after his directions.

It has been suggested by many that Warhol would just take images of things that were hip in his time and cover them in "Warhol gravy", but for Warhol there was always a personal relation between him and his subjects. For instance the Campbell's Soup did not (only) function as an illustration of commercial industry and advertisement, it was an intrinsical part of Warhol's life and memories. As a child his mother had given him this soup when he was sick, and Warhol loved it very much as a grown up. For him (and many other Americans) the soup represented a feeling of being "home".

Another criterion that was important in the way Warhol chose his subjects is that they should also represent a more philosophical notion and have a metaphorical quality. When Warhol painted money, he painted it because he wanted to own it - canvases filled with money. Partly, his work was meant to provide him with this money (and success, fame and maybe even love). At the same time, these paintings spoke of art as a commercial commodity: the paintings of dollar bills represented monetary value as well as investments. In this way, instead of merely depicting dollar bills, the paintings touched on notions like (artistic) value or as a comment on art practice.

Similarly, when Warhol painted photographs of disasters in bright colors ("Red Car Crash," "Purple Jumping Man," "Orange Disaster") they pointed at the horror of the event in the picture and its media value, but also at the way in which these images are trivialized by the media. By turning these "random" clippings into paintings, Warhol transformed them into monuments for personal tragedies. As such, they represent a personal experience, as well as a social comment and an illustration of a time when the media grew to be more and more important.

On a personal level, a lot of Warhol's work is motivational in nature, and speaks of notions like democracy, being able to change things, and optimistic materialism. But Warhol wasn't naively optimistic about these things, his work also deals with loss, death, loneliness and the like. Warhol knew how to juggle many levels of meaning and interpretation, and to combine these in seemingly simple, sometimes even dumb-looking works of art. Although a bit of a generalization, it may be accurate to say that Warhol, in his very personal approach to subjects that everyone knows, depicted them in such an elevated way that they became symbolic.

As time went on, Warhol's work became more and more conceptual and more reflective of art itself. His series of do-it-yourself paintings and Rorschach-blots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (literally, wallpaper with a cow motif) and his oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that show oxidated urine stains) are also noteworthy in this context. Warhol later did a series of his old works in negative, as a comment on his own position as an artist.

In the beginning of his career, Warhol worked on a growing oeuvre of American forms and values like newspaper clippings, disasters, money, commercial products, Coca-Cola bottles, postal stamps, movie stars, criminals, shoes, clothes, etc. while defining a position and researching and making statements. As recognition--and the value of his work--grew, he went back to his roots as a commercial illustrator, and started to take commissions, most noticeably for portraits. These are sometimes viewed as Warhol's sell-out (the revolutionary painter that became a jester), but it can also be argued that his self-supporting way of working fit his world-views. At any rate, his body of portraits--which included many celebrities, athletes, movie stars, politicians, dictators, royalty, transvestites, and his mother--have became a document of an era. Having the money or the relations to be portrayed by Warhol meant that you might be able to enter into immortality. Warhol's commercial effort also included advertisements for Chanel, Apple and more.

There are three more periods that are noteworthy in Warhol's oeuvre as a painter. His self-portraits, of which he made many, with his silver wig and painted over with camouflage print, may represent Warhol studying his own identity. Warhol has spoken about himself and was spoken about as being empty, hollow, a reflection, or a mirror. The second series is his paintings of shadows. These may represent Warhol's study of the abstract. Again, there is a relation with Warhol personally, as he had also depicted himself as "The Shadow," the character from a radio show. Thirdly, Warhol produced many "portfolios," series of small paintings meant for commercial sale. These series would be grouped around a theme; for instance, famous Jews, cars, or animals.

At one point, Warhol publicly declared that he had stopped being a painter, and that he would only make films from then on; but at the end of his life, Warhol took up painting again. His last paintings and drawings are of da Vinci's Last Supper, which he was working on when he died.

Films

Warhol worked across a wide range of mediums - painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. He was also a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than sixty films. One of his most famous films, Sleep (1963), shows a man (John Giorno, who had a relationship with Warhol) sleeping for eight hours. In the 35 minute film Blow Job (1963), he shows the face of David Pelman receiving fellatio. Another, Empire (1964), consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. Warhol's 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film Camp.

His most popular and critically successful film was Chelsea Girls (1966). The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16-mm films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. Then it would be the other film's turn to bask in the glory of sound. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silk-screen works of the early 1960s. The film's influence could be felt as late as 2000 in Mike Figgis' Timecode.

Other important films include My Hustler, Midnight Cowboy, and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), a raunchy pseudo-western. Blue Movie, a film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the film's playing-time, was Warhol's last film as director. The film was at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter. For many years Viva refused to allow it to be screened. It was publicly screened in New York in 2005 for the first time in over thirty years.

After his June 3, 1968 shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat. All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films, all of which frankly were made to make money, starred Joe Dallesandro, who was more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.

In order to facilitate the success of these Warhol-branded, Morrissey-directed movies in the marketplace, all of Warhol's earlier avant-garde films were removed from distribution and exhibition by 1972.

The first volume of a catalogue raisoné for the Factory film archive is to be published in the spring of 2006.

As an actor, Warhol appeared as a bartender in The Cars' music video for their single "Hello Again", and Curiosity Killed The Cat's video for their "Misfit" single (both videos, and others, were produced by Warhol's video production company). He also appeared in an episode of The Love Boat.

Warhol's character has also been represented in several motion pictures. He has been portrayed by Crispin Glover, David Bowie, and Jared Harris, in The Doors, Basquiat, and I Shot Andy Warhol, respectively.

Filmography

Books and Print

Warhol "wrote" several books.

  • A, a novel (1968, ISBN 0-8021-3553-6) is a literal transcription - containing spelling errors and phonetically written background noise and mumbling - of audio recordings of Ondine and several of Andy Warhol's friends hanging out at the Factory, talking, going out.
  • The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; from A to B and back again (1975, ISBN 0-15-671720-4) - according to Pat Hackett's introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, Pat Hackett did the transcriptions and text for the book based on daily phone conversations, sometimes (when Warhol was traveling) using audio cassettes that Andy Warhol gave her. Said cassettes contained conversations with Brigid Berlin (aka Brigid Polk) and former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello.
  • Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980, ISBN 0-15-672960-1), authored by Warhol and Pat Hackett is a retrospective view of the sixties and the role of Pop Art.
  • The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989, ISBN 0-446-39138-7, edited by Pat Hackett) is an edited diary that was dictated by Warhol to Hackett in daily phone conversations. Warhol started keeping a diary to keep track of his expenses after being audited.

Warhol created the fashion magazine Interview that is still published today. The loopy title script on the cover is thought to be either his own handwriting or that of his mother, Julia Warhola, who would often do text work for his early commercial pieces.

Other media

As stated, although Andy Warhol is most known for his paintings and films, he has authored works in many different media.

  • Drawing: Warhol started his career drawing commercial illustrations in "blotted-ink" style for warehouses and magazines. Most well known are his pictures of shoes. Some of his drawings were published in little booklets, like "Yum, Yum, Yum" (about food), "Ho, Ho, Ho" (about Christmas) and (of course) "Shoes, Shoes, Shoes". His most artistically acclaimed book of drawings is probably "The Gold Book", compiled of sensitive, personal drawings of young men. "The Gold Book" is thus dubbed because of the leaf-gold that decorates the pages.
  • Sculpture: Warhol's most famous sculpture is probably his "Brillo Boxes"; silkscreened wooden replicas of Brillo soap boxes. Other famous works include the "Silver Floating Pillows"; gas-filled, silver, pillow-shaped balloons that were floated out of the window during the presentation.
  • Audio: At one point Warhol carried a portable recorder with him wherever he went, taping everything everybody said and did. He referred to this device as his "wife". Some of these tapes were the basis for his literary work. Another audio-work of Warhol's was his "Invisible Sculpture," a presentation in which burglar alarms would go off when entering the room. Warhol's cooperation with the musicians of The Velvet Underground was driven by an expressed desire to become a music producer.
  • Television: Andy Warhol dreamed of a television show that he wanted to call "The Nothing Special", a Special about his favorite subject: Nothing. Later in his career he did create two cable television shows, "Andy Warhol's TV" in 1982 and "Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes" for MTV in 1986. Besides his own shows he regularly made guest-appearances in shows like "Love Boat".
  • Fashion: Warhol is quoted for having said: "I'd rather buy a dress and put it up on the wall, than put a painting, wouldn't you?" One of his most well-known Superstars, Edie Sedgwick, aspired to be a fashion designer, and his good friend Halston was a famous one. Warhol's work in fashion includes silkscreened dresses, a short sub-career as a catwalk-model and books on fashion as well as paintings with fashion (shoes) as a subject.
  • Performance Art: Warhol and his friends staged happenings; theatrical multimedia presentations during parties, containing music, film, slide projections and Gerard Malanga in an S&M outfit cracking a whip. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable is the culmination of this area of his work.
  • Photography: To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. His late oeuvre contains black and white photos sewn together.

Product

In many of his efforts Warhol has taken the position of a producer or director, rather than a creator. From an artist he gradually became the person that determined the direction and was the public face of a company, having a staff of sorts to do the actual labor involved in his products. He would coin an idea and oversee its execution, his Factory evolved from an atelier into an office.

As this position proved to work out, he found himself able to expand his activities into other fields. He founded the gossip magazine Interview, creating a stage for celebrities he "endorsed" and creating jobs for his friends. He adopted the young painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the band The Velvet Underground and presented them to the public as his latest interest, cooperating with them, shaping their public personas. He would produce things and people, and they were part of his artistic product. He endorsed products, appeared in commercials, made business deals and even "sold" the film-making branch of his company when he decided to spend less time filming himself.

In this respect Warhol talked about "Art Business" and "Business Art", and how he thought business was the best type of art. This was a radical new stance, as artists had always presented themselves as flamboyant, individual, visionairy outsiders - commenting on the normal part of society, but never really being a part of it. And receiving appreciation for that position on basis of their idealism, rare talents and personalities. Warhol and other pop-artists helped redefine the artist's position as professional, commercial, popular; a logical and valuable part of society. He did this using methods, imagery and talents that were (or at least seemed to be) available to everyone. Perhaps that has been the most meaningful result of (his) Pop Art: a philosophical and practical incorporation of art into society, art as a product of society.

Museums

The Andy Warhol Museum is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the largest American art museum dedicated to a single artist, holding more than 4,000 works by the artist himself.

Among others, Andy's brother, John Warhola, and the Warhol Foundation in New York, established in 1991 the Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art in the remote town of Medzilaborce, Slovakia. Andy's mother, Julia Warhola, was born 15 kilometers away in the village of Mikova. The museum houses several originals donated mainly by the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York and also personal items donated by Warhol's relatives

Further Reading

  • Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
  • Fred Lawrence Guiles, Lover at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam, 1989).
  • Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Penguin, 2003).
  • Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation (New York: Beacon, 2003).
  • Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003).
  • Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography ( New York: Da Capo Press, 1997)
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Listening

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