Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (/ˈwɔːrhɒl/;[1] born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol is considered one of the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century.[2][3][4] His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
"Warhol" redirects here. For other uses, see Warhol (disambiguation) and Andy Warhol (disambiguation).
Andy Warhol
February 22, 1987 (aged 58)
St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
Carnegie Institute of Technology (Carnegie Mellon University)
Printmaking, painting, cinema, photography
- Chelsea Girls (1966 film)
- Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966 event)
- Campbell's Soup Cans (1962 painting)
- Marilyn Diptych (1962 painting)
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy patrons.[5][6][7] He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame".
In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band the Velvet Underground and founded Interview. He authored numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. In June 1968, he was almost killed by radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot him inside his studio.[8] After gallbladder surgery, Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58 in New York.
Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books and feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Warhol has been described as the "bellwether of the art market".[9] Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. His works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.[10] In 2013, a 1963 serigraph titled Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold for $105 million. In 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold for $195 million, which is the most expensive work of art sold at auction by an American artist.
Art works
Paintings
By the beginning of the 1960s, pop art was an experimental form that several artists were independently adopting; some of these pioneers, such as Roy Lichtenstein, would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the "Pope of Pop", turned to this new style, where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning.
From these beginnings, he developed his later style and subjects. 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 handmade from the artistic process. Warhol frequently used silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants, including notable artist George Condo,[127] who produced his silk-screen multiples, following his directions to make different versions and variations.[128]
Warhol's first pop art paintings were displayed in April 1961, serving as the backdrop for New York Department Store Bonwit Teller's window display. This was the same stage his Pop Art contemporaries Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg had also once graced.[129] It was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the ideas for both the soup cans and Warhol's dollar paintings. On November 23, 1961, Warhol wrote Latow a check for $50 which, according to the 2009 Warhol biography, Pop, The Genius of Warhol, was payment for coming up with the idea of the soup cans as subject matter.[130] For his first major exhibition, Warhol painted his famous cans of Campbell's soup, which he claimed to have had for lunch for most of his life.
It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American objects such as dollar bills, mushroom clouds, electric chairs, Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as newspaper headlines or photographs of police dogs attacking African-American protesters during the Birmingham campaign in the civil rights movement. His work became popular and controversial. Warhol had this to say about Coca-Cola:
Personal life
Sexuality
In 1980, Warhol told an interviewer that he was still a virgin. Former Interview editor Bob Colacello, who was present at the interview, felt it was probably true and that what little sex he had was probably "a mixture of voyeurism and masturbation—to use [Andy's] word abstract".[242] Warhol's assertion of virginity would seem to be contradicted by his hospital treatment in 1960 for condylomata, a sexually transmitted disease.[243] It was also contradicted by his friend Charles Lisanby whom Warhol had romantic feelings for but it was unrequited love.[30] Warhol told him sex was "messy and distasteful."[68] "He told me he'd had sex a few times, he had tried it and didn't really like it."[68] Some of Warhol's other friends claim to have either witnessed Warhol having sex or heard him bragging about it in the 1960s.[68]
The Factory photographer and Warhol's lover Billy Name said, "He the essence of sexuality. It permeated everything. Andy exuded it, along with his great artistic creativity....It brought a joy to the whole art world in New York."[244][245] "But his personality was so vulnerable that it became a defense to put up the blank front," Name said.[246] Warhol's muse BillyBoy denied that he was only a voyeur and said they had sex to orgasm: "When he wasn't being Andy Warhol and when you were just alone with him he was an incredibly generous and very kind person. What seduced me was the Andy Warhol who I saw alone. In fact when I was with him in public he kind of got on my nerves....I'd say: 'You're just obnoxious, I can't bear you.'"[247] Warhol's other lovers included artist John Giorno and Paramount Pictures executive Jon Gould.[248][249] Warhol's longest-lasting relationship was with Jed Johnson, who had nursed Warhol back to health after he was shot then became his collaborator and later achieved fame as an interior designer.[250] Warhol and Johnson "functioned as husband and husband, sharing a bed and a domestic life" for 12 years.[68]
The fact that Warhol's homosexuality influenced his work and shaped his relationship to the art world is a major subject of scholarship on the artist and is an issue that Warhol himself addressed in interviews, in conversation with his contemporaries, and in his publications (e.g., Popism: The Warhol 1960s). Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works (portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor and films such as Blow Job, My Hustler and Lonesome Cowboys) draw from gay underground culture or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. As has been addressed by a range of scholars, many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters, including the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre and 55th Street Playhouse, in the late 1960s.[251]
The first works that Warhol submitted to a fine art gallery, homoerotic drawings of male nudes, were rejected for being too openly gay.[33] In Popism, furthermore, the artist recalls a conversation with the filmmaker Emile de Antonio about the difficulty Warhol had being accepted socially by the then-more-famous (but closeted) gay artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. De Antonio explained that Warhol was "too swish and that upsets them". In response to this, Warhol writes, "There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all the things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I 'should' want to change ... Other people could change their attitudes but not me".[33][252] In exploring Warhol's biography, many turn to this period—the late 1950s and early 1960s—as a key moment in the development of his persona.
Some have suggested that his frequent refusal to comment on his work, to speak about himself (confining himself in interviews to responses like "Um, no" and "Um, yes", and often allowing others to speak for him)—and even the evolution of his pop style—can be traced to the years when Warhol was first dismissed by the inner circles of the New York art world.[253]