Andy Warhol

ARTIST: Andy Warhol

DOB/PLACE: 8/6/28 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

DOD/PLACE: 2/22/87 New York City

EDUCATION: Carnegie Mellon University

MAJOR SHOWS/GALLERIES/COMMISSIONS: Numerous...but I was

unable to find a specific list...maybe because he has been dead 24

years. There is an Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, though.

MEDIA & TECHNIQUES: Painter, Printmaker, Avant-Garde Film

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION: Probably the ultimate POP Artist, his

intention was to remove the line between fine arts and commercial

arts. Warhol on his ‘philosophy’: "When you think about it,

department stores are kind of like museums".

SUBJECT MATTER/THEMES/CONCEPTS DEALT WITH: "Andy Warhol

began as a commercial illustrator, and a very successful one, doing

jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line that derived

from Ben Shahn. He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962, when

the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell's Soup

Cans, 1961-62. From then on, most of Warhol's best work was done

over a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot.

And it all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted

with information, where most people experience most things at

second or third hand through TV and print, through images that

become banal and disassociated by repeated again and again and

again, there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot

and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted

mirror. Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to. He felt it

and embodied it. He was a conduit for a sort of collective American

state of mind in which celebrity - the famous image of a person, the

famous brand name - had completely replaced both sacredness and

solidity. Earlier artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in

series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the

shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and how

these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's

thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about

sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same size,

same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the

condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had

grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may

have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine

ale cans. This affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take

on the object, became the key to Warhol's work; it is there in the

repetition of stars' faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest),

and as a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it

speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media

saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk screen, and not

bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of

the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess.

What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but

the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy..."

- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

LINKS FOR FURTHER STUDY:

Extremely complete biography:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/andy-warhol/

a-documentary-film/44/

http://www.artelino.com/articles/andy_warhol.asp

http://www.peoplefinders.com/article-pop-art-people-the-ultimate-

guide-to-andy-warhol.aspx

VIEW LIST OF WARHOL IMAGES ON THE WEB

researched by Janet Weyenberg