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society and culture

born August 6, 1928 - February 22, 1987

Big player in the USA pop art scene.

Andy warhol changed his name from Warhola early in his life when he lived in Pittsburgh, Warhola being his Slovakian surname - both his parents were immigrants.

Right from the start he showed great artistic promise and eventually studied commerical art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now the Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. When he grauated (in 1949) he moved to New York City where he deliberately started a career in illustration and advertising. His ink drawings of shoes in a jolly, loose style are typical of this period.

When the 1960s rolled around Warhol started to make the paintings of USA icons for which he is justly famous. Campbells soup cans are the most famous of these, though he did many more. To start with he painted each one, but he soon changed to making screeprints instead, He enjoyed the fact that he was not only making work from mass-produced articles, but was mass-prodcuing the work itself as well.

He hired and supervised "art workers" engaged in making prints, shoes, films, and other items at his studio, The Factory, located on Union Square in New York City. The Factory became a meeting place of artists and would-be artists such as Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and Truman Capote. Warhol became the manager of the influential New York rock band The Velvet Underground in 1965. On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, one of the Factory regulars, entered Warhol's studio and fired three shots, nearly killing him. Although the first two rounds had missed, the third bullet passed through Warhol's left lung, spleen, stomach, liver, esophagus and right lung. Solanas then turned the gun on a companion of Warhol, injuring his thigh. Although Warhol survived these injuries, he never fully recovered. Solanas later explained that "he had too much control over my life."

In 1970s and 1980s he mainly made prints of famous people such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

Besides his influence as a painter, Warhol was known as a highly proficient filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than sixty films. His most famous one is Sleep (1963), which 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 a man receiving fellatio. Warhol's character has also been represented in several theatrically released movies; he has been portrayed by Crispin Glover, David Bowie, and Jared Harris, in The Doors, Basquiat and I Shot Andy Warhol, respectively.

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

Warhol used to socialize at Serendipity, a club in New York City.

Warhol's favorite pop band was Blondie.

The Andy Warhol Museum is located in the North Shore district of Pittsburgh, PA. It is the largest American art museum dedicated to a single artist.

Andy was generally regarded as very quiet and a meticulous observer. More than one person, half-kidding, referred to him as "death warmed over". He had a keen eye for art in general and is credited with crystallizing the deceptively simple notion that if you simply point at something and call it "art", it is. He was openly gay, rare for celebrities of his stature at the time, and paid tribute to many male friends and workers in his private art and collections. An organized collector, he tossed practically every piece of paper, fan mail and magazine related to his fame along with personal notes, (gay) porn and found artifacts into hundreds of boxes, numbered them, and set them aside. Many of these exist today and are available for research at his Pittsburgh museum.

Warhol died in New York, NY, United States, following routine gall bladder surgery. He is interred at St. John the Baptist Catholic Cemetery south of Pittsburgh. Fellow artist Yoko Ono was among the speakers at his funeral.

Shot by a groupie, working in advertising, Andy Warhol had a life that lives the American dream, right down to the heart attack. Deciding that art reflected modern society, and modern society was obsessed with fluff, surface, he urged fine art forward into mass produced work that retained something of the patina of the artist put was made in his factory, not necessairly by his own hands at all.

Whether he was urinating on metal sheets to make his work, drawing slim effete men or recouperating from his all night disco-a-thons Warhol tunred the art world upside down, letting what is reflect more than what the art world believed should be. He was the urban cowboy that he loved to project, an electric chair for the pop age, a different dream a day for the people who sold hope whilst knowing that it was all a mis-construed disaster. After all it's all still on canvas, no matter how great it is.

Masterworks
Electric chair
Marilyn

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Warhol".