The Life and Art of Andy Warhol - Essay Example

?Andy Warhol Initially born Andrew Warhola, in August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol lived with his parents and threesiblings. Andy was the youngest. Being dedicated Catholics; the family attended church often and observed the customs of their Eastern European tradition. Andy’s father, a manual worker, relocated his family to a brick house on in 1934 where Andy attended the Holmes School and started taking free art lessons at Carnegie Institute (now known as The Carnegie Museum of Art). Other than drawing, Hollywood cinema fascinated Andy and he was a regular at the local cinema (Danto, 15). He was growing up during the Great Depression in the metropolitan environs of a smoky industrialized city and at a very early age he showed a magnificent talent for sketching the city’s sceneries. Due to an infection when he was 6 he was confined to bed; Andy’s mother and brothers would keep him company for hours while he drew, traced and printed. After this, he grew up loving art, which is said to be the only hobby he had in his childhood. When he turned about nine years old, his father bought him his first camera. Andy took pleasure in taking pictures, so much so that he even developed them on his own in his basement. His father died in 1942, the very same year that he got into Schenley High School. Andy would go on to become the first in his family to go past high school. He nearly failed during first year, but a compassionate professor gave him with one more chance by making him to sign up for a summer class. During this summer, he helped his eldest brother, Paul, sell fruit and vegetables from a van. Andy used every opportunity that arose to do quick on-the-spot portraits of the consumers (Danto, Pp 30). The drawings not only helped get him readmitted but also they made him get a small scholarship until when he graduated at the tender age of sixteen in 1945, he had become position 51 in a class of 278 graduates. His father was a bright man who had recognized his son’s talent and had saved enough money for his college education. Andy went to Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1949 where he attained a degree in Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Pictorial Design. He had a goal of becoming a business illustrator. When he wasn’t in class, he was working in the exhibition section at Horne’s department store creating window displays. It was while he worked there that he was initiated into the world of fashion, which would be the primary influence of his interest in becoming an commercial illustrator. Carnegie institute fostered his enthusiastic sense of drawing, designing and honed his ability to create visually. Almost immediately after graduating, Andy moved to the city of New York to start his profession as a commercial artist. His work made it to Glamour magazine in September of 1949 and after this Andy became one of the most flourishing illustrators of the next decade. These fetes enabled him become rich and win many awards. He had an exceptional, capricious style of sketching that contradicted its everyday sources: traced pictures and imagery. At times Andy engaged the delightfully unusual calligraphy of his mother, who was always recognized in his credits as -Andy Warhol’s Mother-. She had left Pittsburgh sometime in 1952 to live with her son she stayed there for almost twenty years before dying in Pittsburgh in 1972. Andy pleased himself for his work by going on an around-the-world holiday with his buddy Charles from June to August of 1956. They visited Hawaii many countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. Serendipity 3, a stylish eatery and ice cream shop in Manhattan is East Side, was one place where Andy sometimes displayed his work. He frequently held social gatherings there where his friends could spoil themselves and their wives on the restaurant’s signature beverage called “frozen hot chocolate” and all this time helping Andy hand-paint his self-published artists’ books. In April 1961 Andy had his first chance to show his latest art. He started a fashion window at a Department Store called Bonwit Teller has and used five of his sketches as backdrops for the mannequins. Throughout that year, Andy continuously tried different methods of display and added to his range of fashionable imagery. An image called Campbell's soup can became his principal theme and gained him his highest notoriety. He and several other painters working on similar topics but in different techniques were associated to a new art society called Pop Art. In July of 1962 he had his first main display at the Ferus Gallery located in Los Angeles. Time, Life and Newsweek magazines wrote articles about his show. Presently, the complete compilation of thirty-two soup can pictures from his first exhibit can be viewed at the Modern Art Museum in New York. Andy found out that the silkscreen procedure was the ideal method to replicate his images. It was an addition of earlier print techniques that he had used when he was an illustrator. He worked persistently and packed his townhouse with many drawings. To paint bigger works he decided to rent a studio and hire Gerard Malanga as his assistant. Andy unrelentingly created many major works. The early Sixties is said to be his most artistic period. In 1963, he began to try out as a moviemaker. He saw film as a different means of pushing the limits of his imagination. Like his paintings, his art movies caused a stir in the art world because of their strange eccentric boldness. In fact, the term “Superstar” started with the ladies in his films such as Viva and Edie; his studio where he filmed was christened as “The Factory.” Andy self-published a huge number of artists’ guides but the 1st to be produced was Andy’s Index (Book), made available in 1967. He then started Interview, a magazine dedicated to motion pictures, fashion, and trendy culture. Interview is still published to this day. His other books comprise Philosophy of Andy (1975), Exposures of (1979), POPism in (1980), and America in (1985). In 1974, he started a chain of Time Capsules. He crammed these boxes with the resources of his everyday life, including letters, sketches, art, clothes, collectibles, etc. He made over 600 of these capsules and are now an archive goldmine of his life. In the 1970s he frequently mingled with famous people like Jackie Kennedy and Truman Capote, who happened to be significant early topics in his art (Danto, Pp 56). He received a lot of commissions for painted sketches from rich celebrities, musicians and movie stars. These portraits turned into an important aspect of his profession and a main source of livelihood. He became a reveler at Studio 54, the renowned New York disco, sitting with celebrities like fashion designers Halston and Bianca Jagger. Andy went on to become a prolific artist, producing copious works throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His paintings, prints, sketches and photos from this era include Mao, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Guns, Knives, Dollar Signs, and Camouflage. His final displays were series of the Last Supper drawings, exhibited in New York. The shows were in January 1987, just a month before he died Works Cited Danto, Arthur C. Andy Warhol. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Print. Read More