Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was an American artist and filmmaker. Widely regarded as the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, Warhol's work spanned various media, including painting, filmmaking, photography, publishing, and performance art. A leading figure in the pop art movement, his work explores the relationship between advertising, consumerism, mass media, and celebrity culture, transforming everyday consumer goods and familiar icons into renowned artworks. His embrace of mechanical reproduction challenged traditional boundaries between high and low culture. Warhol is credited with popularizing the expression "15 minutes of fame."
Born to working-class Rusyn immigrant parents in Pittsburgh, Warhol began his career as a successful commercial artist in New York before transitioning to fine art. Among his best-known early silkscreen paintings are Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych. In the mid-1960s, Warhol began devoting his attention to creating experimental films such as Blow Job and Empire. He subsequently directed a number of underground films—including Chelsea Girls, Four Stars, and Blue Movie —featuring a shifting group of personalities known as Warhol superstars. His studio, the Factory, became a hub for avant-garde experimentation, bringing together drag queens, poets, bohemians, musicians, and wealthy patrons. Warhol also managed the influential rock band the Velvet Underground, who performed at his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events.
After Warhol survived an assassination attempt in 1968, the Factory evolved into a business enterprise. Warhol founded Interview magazine, produced the play Pork, and published various books such as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism. He executed several series of paintings—notably Mao and Last Supper —and commissioned portraiture. Additionally, he expanded into television with Andy Warhol's TV and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes. Warhol meticulously documented his social life through photography and daily recordings, published posthumously as The Andy Warhol Diaries. He died of cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 58 following gallbladder surgery in 1987.
Warhol has been described as the "bellwether of the art market", with several of his works ranking among the most expensive paintings ever sold. In 2013, Silver Car Crash sold for $105 million. In 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold for $195 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of his art and archives, is the largest in the United States dedicated to a single artist.
Early life and education
Warhol was born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the fourth child of Ondrej Warhola and Julia Warhola. His parents were working-class Rusyn emigrants from Mikó, Austria-Hungary.In 1912, Warhol's father emigrated to the United States and found work in a coal mine. His wife joined him nine years later in 1921. The family lived at 55 Beelen Street and later at 3252 Dawson Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. They were Ruthenian Catholic and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Warhol had two older brothers, Paul and John, as well as an older sister, Maria. Warhol's nephew James Warhola, became a successful children's book illustrator.
At the age of eight, Warhol had a streptococcal infection that led to scarlet fever. Because there were no antibiotics to treat the illness it progressed to rheumatic fever and ultimately the neurological condition Sydenham's chorea, sometimes referred to as St. Vitus' Dance. At times he was confined to bed and made to remain home from school. He would spend these days drawing, creating scrapbooks from Hollywood magazines, and cutting out images from comic books that his mother bought him. He also enjoyed using the family's Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera, and after noticing his passion for photography, his father and brothers built a darkroom in the basement for him.
File:Julia Warhola.jpg|thumb|A toddler Warhol with his mother, Julia, and his brother, John, 1930|276x276pxWhen Warhol started art classes at Holmes School in 1937, his art teacher saw his potential and got him admitted to Saturday drawing lessons at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1942, his father died after drinking contaminated water from a coal mine in West Virginia.
Warhol excelled in school and won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. After graduating from Schenley High School in 1945, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he studied commercial art. During his time there, Warhol joined the campus Modern Dance Club and Beaux Arts Society. He also served as art director of the student art magazine, Cano, illustrating a cover in 1948 and a full-page interior illustration in 1949. These are believed to be his first two published artworks. Warhol earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949.
Career
1940s
After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in June 1949, Warhol moved to New York City with his classmate Philip Pearlstein. They lived in a sixth-floor walk-up tenement building on St. Mark's Place near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. On his second day in New York, Warhol visited Tina Fredericks, the art director of Glamour magazine, whom he had met during a brief visit to the city the previous year. He presented a portfolio of work completed at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which Fredericks received favorably, purchasing a small $10 drawing of an orchestra for her personal collection. She subsequently commissioned Warhol to produce shoe illustrations; after more than one attempt, his drawings were accepted. Glamour published a page of Warhol's shoe illustrations along with several pages of people climbing the "ladder of success," accompanying the major feature "What Is Success?," which comprised six individual articles by Katherine Sonntag, Hazel M. Wood, Margot Clarke, Patricia Curtain, Marya Mannes, and Elizabeth Weston. Thus beginning his career as a commercial artist.1950s
Warhol was hired by prominent fashion magazines, including Glamour, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar, and produced a prolific body of advertisements throughout the 1950s. During this period, gallerist Alexander Iolas is often credited with discovering Warhol and organized his first solo exhibition, Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote, at the Hugo Gallery in New York in 1952.Warhol designed several covers for Interiors magazine between 1953 and 1954. In 1954, Warhol exhibited his work on multiple occasions at Vito Giallo's Loft Gallery in New York. ARTnews observed that Warhol had "developed an original style of line drawing," noting that his technique produced "the effect of the reverse side of a negative, although his lines are broken and the spaces not clouded." His "blotted line" technique combined aspects of printmaking and graphite drawing on paper. Within a year, Warhol—then working out of his railroad apartment on East 34th Street—invited Giallo to become his first paid studio assistant.
In 1955, Warhol began designing advertisements for the shoe manufacturer Israel Miller. Photographer John Coplans recalled that "nobody drew shoes the way Andy did. He somehow gave each shoe a temperament of its own, a sort of sly, Toulouse-Lautrec kind of sophistication, but the shape and the style came through accurately and the buckle was always in the right place." By 1956, Warhol's distinctive style had made him widely recognized as a fashion illustrator. His drawings for L. Miller attracted considerable attention, and he was so busy that he had to turn down assignments.
In a 1956 interview with Mademoiselle, Warhol described his approach to combining commercial and fine art: "Every time I draw a shoe for a job, I do an illustration for myself." He acknowledged that "you almost have to specialize to get assignments," but noted that most New York art directors were eager to "give you a chance to do things." Warhol's personal illustrations were whimsical shoe designs embellished with gold leaf, and each represented a famous figure such as Truman Capote, Kate Smith, James Dean, Julie Andrews, Elvis Presley, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. They sold for $50 to $225 apiece when they were presented at the Bodley Gallery in New York in December 1956.
In 1956, the Museum of Modern Art politely declined Warhol's gift of his drawing Shoe, citing limited storage space and asking him to retrieve it. Nevertheless, that same year one of his shoe drawings was included in MoMA's Recent Drawings U.S.A. group exhibition, marking Warhol's first museum showing. That year, he traveled around the world with his friend, production designer Charles Lisanby, studying art and culture in several countries. While in Kyoto, Japan, Warhol drew a stylized portrait of business tycoon Madame Helena Rubinstein.
Warhol habitually used the expedient of tracing photographs projected with an epidiascope. Using prints by Edward Wallowitch, the photographs would undergo a subtle transformation during Warhol's often cursory tracing of contours and hatching of shadows. Warhol used Wallowitch's photograph Young Man Smoking a Cigarette for a 1958 design for a book cover he submitted to Simon and Schuster for the Walter Ross pulp novel The Immortal, and later used others for his series of paintings.
To promote himself as an artist, Warhol produced and distributed self-published books of his illustrations, including 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy and A Gold Book, which he gave to potential clients and contacts to generate work. He frequently incorporated calligraphy by his mother, Julia Warhol, to accompany his drawings.
With the rapid expansion of the record industry, RCA Records hired Warhol to design album covers and promotional materials. By the late 1950s, he was also working for high-end advertising clients, including Tiffany & Co.