The Life and Art of Andy Warhol - Case Study Example

ANDY WARHOL His Life and Family Andrew Warhola, popularly known as Andy Warhol, was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Andy’s parents were Andrej Warhola and Julia Zavacky Warhola. His parents were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Europe and Andy was the youngest from their three sons (Mattern, 8). The Warhola’s family was very poor. Andy’s father worked in a coal mine while his mother cleaned houses and made metal flowers out of tin cans for living. At age four, Andy started schooling. One of his classmates bullied and hit him on the first day of school. Because of that, he asked his mother Julia to let him stay at home. Andy did not attend school for two years and drew pictures and read stories with his mother instead. Andy attended Holmes Elementary School and Schenley High School. Andy missed a lot of lessons because he was often sick. He contracted rheumatic fever when he was eight. He also acquired chorea, making him stay in bed for a month. A few years later, Andy’s skin became pale with red blotches. Due to his condition, he had to stay at home. He watched cartoons, finished coloring books, and reading movie magazines. His sickness and interests in cartoons and movies became his inspiration and topic in most of his art (Mattern, 10). From 1945-1949, Andy, together with Balcomb Greene, Robert Lepper, Samuel Rosenberg, and others, attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. In June 1949, Andy graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design. His Career as an All-around Artist After graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology, Warhol decided to pursue his career as a commercial artist in New York City. In September 1949, his first work appeared in Glamour magazine. He became one of the most successful illustrators in 1950s onwards and had won Art Director’s Club Medal in 1957 for his advertising work (Mattern, 6). In the same year, Warhol underwent plastic surgery to change the shape of his nose and had almost lost most of his hair (Mattern, 7). He was awarded by the American Institute of Graphic Arts as a successful illustrator. Tiffany & Co., The New York Times, I. Miller Shoes, Bonwit Teller, Columbia Records, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Fleming-Joffe, NBC, and others were among Warhol’s clients. Most of Warhol’s commercial works were based on photographs and other source images, and on the handwriting of his mother Julia. Warhol loved his mother so much that after Julia’s death, Warhol painted memorial portraits, film and shot videotapes of her. Warhol traveled around the world and had visited countries in Asia and Europe in 1956. He began painting in late 1950s and made his first painting based on comics and ads. A 32 series of Campbell’s Soup Cans was created in 1962 that made Warhol a celebrity. In the same year, Warhol also made series of celebrity portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor as well as series of “death and disaster” like images of electric chairs, suicides, and car crashes. In 1963, the world of films was also invaded by Andy Warhol. He was responsible for many classics of avant-garde cinema over a five-year period. Some of his films were Sleep (1963), Empire (1963), Kiss (1963-64), and The Chelsea Girls (1966). From 1963 to 1976, Warhol made 600 films; almost 500 of it were short Screen Tests. Aside from being a film-maker, Warhol was also a producer of his films while Paul Morrissey was the director. Warhol began to enter the field of sculpture during his first exhibition held in 1964. Along with his sculptures were Brillo Boxes, Heinz Boxes, Del Monte Boxes, Mott’s Boxes, and Kellogg’s Boxes. His new studio, the Factory, was the venue for most parties and was always mentioned in magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and Esquire. In 1965, Warhol was the first artist who played a major role in exhibiting video as an art. He made 2500 videotapes, including Factory Diaries, Phoney, and others. In 1965, during an exhibition of his Flowers paintings in Paris, he made an announcement that he would retire from painting to focus on filmmaking. However, during 1966, he came back to painting. Warhol made the “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable” featuring Velvet Underground, a rock and roll band. The EPI has led to the invention psychedelic light show as nightclub entertainment. Warhol also operated a dance club in Manhattan called the Gymnasium. Warhol exhibited Cow Wallpaper which is Day-Glo colored, and Silver Clouds which were floating silvery balloons shaped like pillows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966. In 1968, Warhol covered the exterior of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet with Cow Wallpaper. Andy Warhol had faced the most critical part of his life when Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967), came into the studio and shot Warhol in the chest on June 3, 1968. He underwent a five-hour operation and while recovering, he painted series of portraits of Happy Rockefeller, the wife of the Governor of New York. His Work through Decades During the 1950s, Warhol focused on publishing series of artist’s books. He published his first mass-produced book, Andy Warhol’s Index in 1967. Among of his published works were A Novel (1968), Blue Movie (1970), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), POPism (1980), Exposures (1979), Children’s Book (1983), America (1985), Party Book (1988), and The Diaries of Andy Warhol (1989), a scandalous best-seller. A lot of his writings adopted the style of recorded conversations. This was the inspiration for his play, Pork, held in London and New York in 1971 and has recorded about 3400 audiotapes. It was near the closure of 1960s when Warhol exhibited Raid the Icebox I, an exhibit which came from the collection of the Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. Warhol did not only focus on his usual masterpieces but chose damaged paintings, historical footwear and parasols, and other unexpected items as art subject. This was the time when Warhol started to develop a keen eye for antiques and has led to the discovery of French Art Deco designs, Native American blankets and pottery, and American Folk Art and cookie jars. Interview, a magazine devoted to film, fashion, and popular culture was co-founded by Warhol. Andy Warhol became well-known around the world for his saying, “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” The 1970s marked the peak of Andy Warhol’s career. Commissions for his designs were outrageously increasing because of different awards and popularity ratings. Throughout 1970s, Warhol was often celebrities’ companion in the famous New York Disco. He frequently socialized with Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote, fashion designer Halston, entertainer Liza Minnelli, and Bianca Jagger. Since then, Andy started to receive hundreds of commissions from portraits of wealthy socialites, music and film stars, and other clients. The fame Andy Warhol receiving continued to escalate. In 1971, he co-designed the cover for The Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers and was nominated for a Grammy Award. He became a partygoer and a regular customer of New York Disco. The 1970s was the period of experimentation for Warhol in terms of sculpture. Warhol made experimentation on the 3 versions of Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall) sculpture for Osaka World’s Fair. The design consists of a large shower of water in front of a wall of 3-D lenticular prints of daisies. He also experimented on Invisible Sculpture made of motion detectors and loud sirens. A product also of his experimentation is the Oxidation paintings, made with human urine on canvases covered with metallic paint. Warhol started the 600-series Time Capsules, cardboard boxes that he filled with the materials of his everyday life, including mail, photos, art, clothing, collectibles, etc. Warhol continued to produce masterpieces in the field of prints, paintings, drawings, and photographs. Some of these are Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, Camouflage, Last Supper paintings, Mao (1974), and Self-Portrait (1978). In 1980s, Warhol returned to the idea of wallpaper art and created Fish (1984), Paintings for Children, and Sewn Photos (multiple prints of identical photos sewn together in a grid) in January 1987. Warhol’s television show, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes and Andy Warhol’s TV, aired on MTV and New York. He created Saturday Night Live and appeared on the Love Boat episode. He was responsible for most of the music videos of rock bands such as The Cars, and signed modeling contracts for Ford, Zoli, Sony, TDK, Vidal Sassoon, and many other companies. In 1984, Warhol abandoned the silkscreen method of painting and returned to a painting with a brush. On February 22, 1987, Andy Warhol died in New York City due to complications after having a surgery related to the removal of his gall bladder. A ten-day auction of his art works and antiques in 1988 has raised over 20 million dollars. The fund from his art works and antiques was allocated to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. There were two museums announced and established in honor of Andy Warhol. The first is The Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art in Slovakia in 1991 and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg in 1994. Reference Mattern, Joanne. Andy Warhol. Minnesota, ABDO Publishing Company, 2005. p. 1-31. Read More