Andy Warhol Essay, Research Paper

Andy Warhol

by Brandon Noll

Andy Warhol was thought to be born around 1929 to 1930 near

Pittsburgh to Czech immigrant parents. His real name was Andrew

Warhola. He was an American painter and filmmaker who was a

leader during the pop art movement. Other artists during his time

were Rosquest and Lichtenstein. The greatest influences on his work

were his mother and comic books. By some art experts he is

considered to being one of the most controversial artists of all time.

He is considered that because his art broke the impressionist tradition.

He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and got an education at the

Carnegie Institute of Technology, and soon after he practiced

commercial art in New York City which was an experience that he

used later in his career. He won the Art Director’s Club Medal in

1957 for his illustrations for advertisements. He attracted a lot of

attention in the 1960’s with exhibitions of pop art objects from daily

life, such as “Cambell’s Soup Can” in 1965 and “Green Coca-Cola

Bottles in 1962, and of entertainers like Marilyn Monroe. These

images were silk screened, which is a mechanical process that allowed

them to be endlessly repeated. He would also paint everyday

occurrences such as car crashes and black riots. Warhol took a similar

impersonal approach in his experimental underground films, such as

The Chelsea Girls, which was a seven hour, virtually unedited

semidocumentary. Later, more complex films, such as Lonesome

Cowboys and Trash are also marked by improvised dialogue, lack of

plot, and extreme eroticism. Among Warhol’s publications are “The

Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again” and

America, a collection of his scathing photographs of contemporary life

in the U.S. From 1969 until his death in 1987, he published

‘Interview,’ a monthly magazine with illustrated articles about current

celebrities. In 1994 the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest single-

artist museum in the United States, opened in Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania.