One of the 20th century’s best-known artists, Andy Warhol made his name in the early 1960s with paintings and prints of brand name celebrities and foods ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to Coca-Cola and Campbell’s Soup. These brash, innovative works are considered icons of Pop Art, a movement that both critiqued and celebrated postwar American consumer culture. By the end of the decade, Warhol had become a celebrity in his own right, equally famous for his platinum wig and the star-studded parties he threw at his studio, the Factory, as he was for his paintings, drawings, sculpture, and films. Although he was only 58 years old when he died, he left an immense body of work that seems increasingly relevant today as the distinctions among art, entertainment, information, and spectacle continue to erode.
Early Life, Commercial Art
Born in Pittsburgh to working-class immigrant parents, Warhol earned a degree in design at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. His goal was to become a commercial artist, and within a year of arriving in New York City he had top assignments from Glamour magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Martini & Rossi, Columbia Records, I. Miller, and many others. His whimsical line drawings of cats, butterflies, and especially women’s shoes made him one of the most sought and highly paid illustrators in the city.
Pop Art, Silkscreen Technique, Sixteen Jackies
After working as an illustrator for only a few years, Warhol reinvented himself as a fine artist. He based his paintings on imagery he found in the American mass media: news photos, celebrity head shots, film stills, comics, logos, and advertisements. To convert his source images into paintings, Warhol made them into photo silkscreens and printed them on canvas. Smudges, misalignments, and inconsistencies were accepted, giving the paintings a handmade appearance despite his use of a commercial process. Sometimes the paintings include a single image, as in Marilyn (1967) and the Campbell’s Soup series (1966). These become larger-than-life, iconic portraits, while those printed in grids, such as Sixteen Jackies (1964), suggest the way that repetition can simultaneously embed an image in one’s memory and deaden its effect.
Late Work
In 1968, Warhol was shot and nearly killed by the actress Valerie Solanis, who had had a bit part in one of his films. Post-shooting, his work became both more commercial and more introspective. He hired himself out as a portraitist, making flattering images of the rich and famous; but he also made haunting self-portraits that hinted at his purported fear of death. And while his colorful, stylized paintings of dollar signs seem to comment on his own status as an art star whose every scribble had value, his large-scale abstractions, based on common visual imagery such as shadows and Rorschach blots, hint at the sublime.
Legacy
In 1987, in accordance with Warhol’s will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established to support projects by and about visual artists. The Andy Warhol Museum, located in Pittsburgh, has a permanent collection of more than 700 artworks and 350 films and video by Warhol, as well as an extensive archive that includes his Time Capsules, boxes of ephemera that he began assembling in 1974.
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