Andy Warhol Essay, Research Paper

andy warhol

1948 ? Self portrait, He paints himself anyway he wants. Never like his nose.

Before and after ? Lady with nose from big to small

Plane crash 129 die in jet- idea of celeberty-1962

He is all about his money, one of the most important things in his life, that and fame

Bullet shots ? He urinated on this painting, looks 3d ?

Myths ? Mickey?. And other characters. Spectrum from right to left ? good to bad

Soup ? warhole contradiction. Soup represented good American people. He represented the opposite, with drugs, alcohole and other addictions- sex movie?s. Thought of a good go happy company Campbell soup-1962

Elvis ? 1954- celebrity, masculinity ? cowboy evils

“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…”

POP ART, Contemporary art

The Andy Warhol Biography

The American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928. There has for years been quite a bit of confusion to where and when Andy Warhol was born, but according to Andy’s two older brothers and the birth certificate that was filed in Pittsburgh in 1945, he was born on August 6th in Pittsburgh. Whether or not this is the day he was born hasn’t been proved, but it was on this date he would celebrate his birthday. However, there is no doubt that he died at 6:31 A.M. on Sunday, February 22nd, 1987, at the New York Hospital after a gallbladder operation. He is considered a founder and major figure of the POP ART movement. A graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, he moved to New York City and gained success as a commercial artist. He got his first break in August 1949, when Glamour Magazine wanted him to illustrate a feature entitled “Success is a Job in New York”. But by accident the credit read “Drawings by Andy Warhol” and that’s how Andy dropped the “a” in his last name. He continued doing ads and illustrations and by 1955 he was the most successful and imitated commercial artist in New York. In 1960 he produced the first of his paintings depicting enlarged comic strip images – such as Popeye and Superman – initially for use in a window display. Warhol pioneered the development of the process whereby an enlarged photographic image is transferred to a silk screen that is then placed on a canvas and inked from the back. It was this technique that enabled him to produce the series of mass-media images – repetitive, yet with slight variations – that he began in 1962. These, incorporating such items as Campbell’s Soup cans, dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles, and the faces of celebrities, can be taken as comments on the banality, harshness, and ambiguity of American culture.

Later in the 1960s, Warhol made a series of experimental films dealing with such ideas as time, boredom, and repetition; they include Sleep (1963), Empire (1964), and The Chelsea Girls (1966). In 1965 he started working with a rockband called “The Velvet Underground” formed by Lou Reed and John Cale. Andy introduced them to the model and moviestar Nico and she sang on their debut album from 1967 “The Velvet Underground and Nico”. Andy would travel around the country, not only with The Velvets, but also with superstar of the year Edie Sedgwick and the lightshow “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable”.