Timeline: May 2007
Assignment: Research paper on an artist and use the text in a design
Andy Warhol: The Prince of Pop
The 1920s in America were known as the “Jazz Age” or the “Roaring Twenties” and it was a time when the country’s culture was beginning to change. The era was marked with many technological, scientific, and stylistic advances as well as strong economic prosperity. During this time the television was introduced to the public, penicillin was discovered, and fashion was at the forefront of everyone’s mind. It is arguably most famous, though, for the rise of radical political movements and social statements. Perhaps this is why it is so fitting that in the midst of all this, a new life began – a life that eventually was consumed by the culture surrounding its birth, and death.
Andrew Warhola was born into an immigrant family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the summer of 1928. With English as a second language, his father worked as a coal miner and often had long periods away from home until he died in 1942. Andrew’s mother became a housewife and spent a great deal of time at home. Andrew spent much of his childhood and early teenage years sick in bed with chorea, a disease that after three relapses caused his skin to be blotchy and left his body frail.
During his illnesses, Andrew was encouraged by his mother to send fan letters to young movie stars in order to help pass the time. He began collecting autographs from people like Freddie Bartholomew, Truman Capote, Mickey Rooney, and the beautiful blonde Shirley Temple. It was perhaps during this time that he developed an admiration for the Hollywood lifestyle, in which this dream world appealed to the shy, awkward, and pale young boy. This dream had a profound impact on his lifestyle and career later in life. After graduating from high school, Andrew attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology where he studied pictorial design with the intention of becoming a commercial illustrator. He quickly moved to New York City upon completion of his degree and began a new life under his simplified name, Andy Warhol.
His career began with a free-lance job at Glamour magazine and over the next several years he worked as a commercial illustrator for various major fashion magazines, record labels, and advertising companies. Sometime during this period, he presented a gift to a client with a note reading, “This Vanity Fair Butterfly Holder was designed for you by Andy Warhol, whose paintings are exhibited in many leading museums and contemporary galleries.” At the time this statement was untrue; his work was not yet featured or famous, though he believed it would be if he made it appear as though it was.
Throughout his early career he wanted to become famous and continued his childhood fascination with celebrities. He focused his increased obsession specifically onto Truman Capote, a famous American writer whose works later became known as literary classics. Capote wanted nothing to do with the nearly unknown Warhol and once said, “He used to stand outside my house…he wanted to become a friend of mine, wanted to speak to me, to talk to me. He nearly drove me crazy.”
But Warhol did not give up. During the summer of 1952, he held his first exhibition in a rented room at the Hugo Gallery in New York City. In an obvious attempt to gain Capote’s attention and acceptance, Warhol titled it “Fifteen Drawings based on the Writings of Truman Capote.” Although invited to the opening, Capote did not attend. Following this otherwise successful event, Warhol spent the next ten years continuing work as an artist.
During this time he traveled the world and socialized with other young New Yorkers, many of which shared in Warhol’s homosexual lifestyle. He attended social functions, movie screenings, and art shows. In the spring of 1961, Warhol purchased a work by Jasper John called Lightbulb. This drawing of a light bulb lying on its side was done in black and white with a rustic appearance. Using this as inspiration, he continued developing his artistic style and eventually became interested in painting with black and white as well as color based on comic strips.
Warhol began to associate himself more and more with icons of the art world and eventually had a professional relationship with art dealer Leo Castelli. This connection moved Warhol up to the same social level as artists Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, but also caused tension with design styles. Lichtenstein was famous for using a comic style and therefore Warhol began to move into a new direction, which ultimately defined a major step forward in his career.
Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood was home to Warhol’s first solo pop exhibit in the summer of 1962. This exhibition featured a series of 32 different canvases of Campbell’s soup cans, each using the same can design but different labels for different flavors of the soup. During the painting process, he got bored and switched to rubber stamps and silk screening techniques because they were easier and faster.
During this exhibition, Hollywood actress and blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe was found dead less than ten miles away. Warhol reacted to this news by immediately creating a silkscreen painting featuring the late actress. This work was the first of many which featured a silkscreen format that included other female celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy. Through a use of photographs, silkscreen techniques, cheerless color, repetition, and the grid, he drained the body and face of substance and turned his subjects into ghostly copies.
The style he presented during this time established Warhol in the artistic world, although he was not satisfied and had a strong desire to move into other mediums as well. Not long after producing the silkscreen prints, he purchased his first video camera and began experimenting with film. The camera he purchased allowed him the opportunity to shoot only a few minutes worth of video.
Warhol’s first film, entitled Sleep, featured poet John Giorno sleeping. The two had met during an exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable gallery in New York and began a sexual relationship. Warhol wanted to film his lover sleeping, and he did; that is all he did. Originally planned as an eight-hour-long movie, the film was in fact made by looping much of the short footage of Giorno sleeping. This became very indicative of Warhol’s cinematic style as most of his movies were silent, simple, and seductive.
Warhol worked with his film partner Paul Morrissey on numerous other works as time progressed, all of which had the same common theme. Blow Job featured a young man receiving fellatio, although it only showed a stable view of the man from his neck up. Other movies include Kiss (scenes of two people kissing), Eat (a man eating), and Empire (a view of the Empire State Building). Each of these films reflect Warhol’s early style of videography in which the title explicitly dictated the movie’s sole content and the scenes contained footage almost as simple as the name.
As time passed, Warhol wanted to expand his spectrum of film quality and began moving closer to mainstream genres. He filmed and held a screening for his work entitled Chelsea Girls in 1966. Originally created as a six-hour-long film, Warhol and Morrissey eventually decided to screen the film in pairs and allowed projectionists to choose how to combine the parts. Most of his works that followed, while still focusing on a common theme, were shorter and able to be seen during one sitting. In doing so, Warhol was becoming more and more focused on the fascination he had during his childhood and adapting his style to fit into the glamour of Hollywood.
As his career progressed, Warhol opened a studio called the “Factory” in which he created a central location for production of both film and physical media. The Factory moved to various locations over the years but was always a headquarters of sorts for Warhol and his workers. In retrospective, this second home reflected much of the person he had become and all who entered the workspace over the years shared in this lifestyle. It brought together people from different walks of life and served as a social gathering place for the rich and famous just as much as it did for the poor and unglamorous.
Warhol chose the name Factory for his studio for a reason; it was a place where he spent many days and nights working on his paintings. He and his workers continued to use silkscreening in order to mass-produce images just as any other factory would create their own products – whether it was shoes, books, or Campbell’s Soup. In order to keep working at the pace to which he had become accustomed, Warhol kept a group on hand to assist with the daily operations of the Factory. These people were the hippies of downtown and usually consisted of porn stars, drag queens, drug addicts, or musicians who later collectively became known as Warhol superstars. As Warhol’s status continued to rise, the Factory became a common stop for high society to mingle with the city’s low-lifers. It was often the place where the two polar opposite social classes would meet to schmooze, share drugs, drink liquor, and have sex.
As if his resume had taken a drug, his career hit a high in 1966 when Warhol was one of “500 close friends” who received an invitation to “the most exclusive and most glamorous party of the decade.” It was the Black & White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, hosted by none other than Truman Capote.This event was the beginning of a mutual friendship between the two – something Warhol had wanted for years – but also the catalyst of an idealistic shift for the artist.
The two remained friends for years, during which time Warhol continued working on his painting and films. His stardom continued to flourish and he became absorbed into high society. He became addicted to drugs and alcohol and lived in a world of excess. Although he avoided prolonged conversation, he insisted on attending as many social events and possible and wanted to be seen by everyone. He was certainly a hot topic in gossip columns and attracted much of the public’s attention. This directly impacted the link between two worlds of elite art culture and the everyday people.
The general public usually doesn’t know a great deal about art, but ultimately can recognize exactly what they like. Thus Warhol is largely considered to be the first postwar artist to be admired by both those who have no taste whatsoever and those who do. He appealed to a large group of people because he was genuinely interested in documenting society, demonstrated by his various articles of work in both film and print. His movies were centered on everyday themes people have in their lives, while his paintings truly show what was going in America at the time.
During the period when the United States invaded Vietnam, Warhol refused to focus any of his art on the war. He believed that documenting such an unpopular event would cause a great deal of controversy and would lower his fame. Instead, he used existing materials in order to create new ones. He did not care that he was recreating what already was there and often used newspaper clippings or photographs in order to encourage not the reflection upon what society has experienced but rather what they will not directly experience. This is demonstrated partially by his “death and disaster” series in which repetitive use of jet crashes and burning cars, among other items, were utilized. He also used everyday objects such as boxes, in addition to the soup cans and celebrity photos, as inspiration for some of his paintings.
While he continued using well-known images as inspiration from his days as an emerging artist all the way through his later works, Warhol became the target of interpretation among mass culture. One of his early works that featured a Brillio box has been compared to artist Marcel Duchamp, a popular Dada and Surrealism movement artist who was known for capturing images of everyday objects. After creating a series of camouflage paintings, he was further compared to American painter and abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Although these two artists may have been a source of inspiration for Warhol, they do not all share the same movements.
It is widely accepted that Warhol falls under the Modern or Postmodern movements, and arguably can fall under both. Because he was not nostalgic of earlier models of art and prospered with a mechanical and industrial form, he fits with many other Modern artists. Alternately, he can be considered a Postmodernist because of his propensity to use repetition and existing art in the creation of his own. Perhaps it was his vision to start a movement all of his own rather than be subject to the ideals of others. Either way, Warhol’s work collectively fit into the category of pop art and he became known as the “Prince of Pop” because he combined the artistic style with popular culture.
From the time he worked as a commercial illustrator through his time as a famous artist, he was always being told what to do. Upper management dictated specific elements during his freelance work experience and even though he was later free to produce whatever he wanted, the public dominated his inspiration for works upon becoming a social artist. This ultimately led to the interpretation and detraction of his work.
Many people believed that Warhol couldn’t draw and that he was inarticulate, as demonstrated by his continual reuse of images. They further described him as mundane and having the inability to be original while using familiar compositional design. But that was his intention. In line with the silkscreening and machine-like production used in the Factory, Warhol wanted the world to be a machine so that everyone and everything would be alike.
Although the art world and the general public considered him to be a radical and provocative artist, he knew which lines to cross and which ones to pretend did not exist. He knew when to leave them satisfied and when to leave them coming back for more. He knew that it was his responsibility to present things as they were. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he once said, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films, and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
Warhol responded to the negativity surrounding his work and began associating himself only with the young artists who looked up to and appreciated him. Valerie Solanos was one such person who believed her admiration for Warhol would result in the production of a screenplay she wrote. Upon finding out the contrary, Solanos went to the Factory and shot Warhol on June 3, 1968. He was transported to Columbus Hospital where he was pronounced clinically dead and then brought back to life.
Because of this experience he believed he was living on borrowed time and refused to go near any hospital, often giving detailed directions to drivers in order to follow a route that avoided such establishments. In 1987, after successfully staying away from hospitals for many years, he was forced to return. He checked into New York Hospital on February 20 for emergency surgery scheduled for the next day on his enlarged gall bladder. The procedure went smoothly and he spent the night in recovery. Suddenly, the next morning Warhol turned blue – a stark contrast the usually pale skin that had plagued him for decades – and his pulse weakened. Although hospital staff tried profusely to revive him, Warhol died, again. Just as he was correct in thinking that an unpopular work of art would end his career, he also was correct in thinking that his next trip to the hospital would end his life.
It is quite ironic that he died this way. The man who once painted a camouflage self-portrait symbolizing that he wanted to fit in, yet also wanted to hide, would perhaps become even more famous after death. This was a paradox that he could never resolve and it dictated his life. He spent his childhood writing to the blonde Shirley Temple and his early career painting pictures of the blonde Marilyn Monroe. It is strangely parallel that, like Warhol himself, they continued to be seen in the minds of many people even though they were hidden in death.
Throughout his life, Andy Warhol transformed the world of art and brought it into mainstream America. His work in print and film pushed the boundaries of modern society as it was known during the 1960s through the 1980s. He wanted to live the Hollywood lifestyle that he has dreamed of as a child, and he wanted to be accepted by everyone. He embodied a very American theme: the unfulfillable wish to be loved by everyone. Simply put, that is why he was so popular…that is why is was able to bring together art, culture, sex, drugs, and social classes…and that is why he was known as the “Prince of Pop.”
