About Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room row house apartment at 73 Orr Street in Pittsburgh. His parents, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants Andrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons. Andy was their youngest.
Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father, a laborer, moved his family to a brick home on Dawson Street in 1934. Warhol attended the nearby Holmes School and took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now The Carnegie Museum of Art). In addition to drawing, Hollywood movies enraptured Andy and he frequented the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. Andy enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself in his basement.
Andrej Warhola died in 1942, the same year that Andy entered Schenley High School. Recognizing his son’s talent, Andrej had saved money to pay for his college education. Warhol attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) from 1945 to 1949. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design with the goal of becoming a commercial illustrator. During these years he worked in the display department at Horne’s department store.
Gallery
Warhol's early work in commercial illustration was all about elevating an ordinary product into a more glamorous light for the purpose of selling it as an object of desire to the masses. His drawings of women’s shoes were decorative and whimsical examples of this where a high heel might be festooned with flowers and birds, lending it an ephemeral female connotation. This early experience in manipulating popular taste would come to inform his original Pop works, which placed everyday objects on a pedestal in their stark and unadorned simplicity. Unlike the commercial work, designed to seduce, this new art would produce the opposite effect by lending a more dispassionate and impersonal mood.
Much debate still surrounds the iconic screen-printed images with which Warhol established his reputation as a Pop artist in the early 1960s. Some view his Death and Disaster series, along with his Marilyn pictures, as frank expressions of our universal sorrow surrounding public events. Others view them as some of the first expressions of 'compassion fatigue' – reflecting the way we lose the ability to sympathize with events from which we feel removed. Still others think of these pictures as screens, which buffer us from horrifying circumstances while we personally register and process shock.
Although artists had been influenced by popular culture throughout the twentieth century, Pop art marked an important new stage in the breakdown between fine art, celebrity culture, and commercial art forms. Although Warhol's paintings from the early 1960s were important in pioneering these developments, he would soon take Pop off the canvas and become a leading example of blurring the lines between physical life and art. His lifestyle as an artist and eccentric personality was elevated to star status, his very existence in the social whir of New York City as iconic as the notables whose faces would appear on his eponymous silkscreens. As ringmaster of his silver walled studio coined The Factory, he would create art, film, and host parties populated by a roving cast of larger than life characters where life imitated art and art imitated life. It is arguable that these diverse activities were just as influential in expanding the implications of Pop art.
Although Warhol would continue to create paintings intermittently throughout his career, in 1965 he "retired" from the medium to concentrate on making experimental films. The films furthered Warhol’s obsessions with the mundane, oftentimes taking a subject such as Sleep or Eat and painstakingly presenting it in real time, reflecting our droll-like obsessions with ourselves. Despite years of neglect, these films have recently attracted widespread interest, and Warhol is now seen as one of the most important filmmakers of the period, a forefather of independent film.
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Art Style
Andy Warhol used commercial silkscreening to create multiple copies of his art pieces. Based on close-up portraits of his subject material, silkscreen techniques enabled him to produce the same image in multiple color variations. He commonly used bright, upbeat colors to portray the images in the silkscreen art work. While silkscreening was his predominant style later in his career, Andy Warhol also made films, sculptures, album covers and drawings.
Campbell's Soup
Andy Warhol used soup as the focus of his art in multiple pieces. One of his most iconic and recognizable pieces is the rows of Campell's soup cans showing the variety of soup available. Campell's soup cans were prominently displayed in a variety of pieces in the 1960s and again in the mid-1970s. His last soup can piece was produced in 1985. Robert Indiana, who knew Andy Warhol well, reported that the reason Andy used soup cans in his art "is that he liked soup." Other food-related art included Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo boxes.
Portraiture
Andy Warhol used people as the subject of his art on numerous occasions. He used Marylin Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor.
Politics in Art
Warhol's subject matter was not limited to popular culture or people. Politics and newsworthy events and imagery were also captured in his art. The Birmingham riots were captured along with several other images of the civil rights movement. Mushroom clouds, electric chairs and police dogs were also depicted.