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