Andy Warhol Essay, Research Paper

The American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol (wohr’-hohl), born Cleveland, Ohio, August 6, 1928?, died February 22, 1987, was a founder and major figure of the Pop Art movement. A graduate (1949) of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he gained success in New York City as a commercial artist in the 1950s. 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 where 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, 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). A celebrity himself until his death, he founded Interview magazine and published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975) and America (1985).