Andy Warhol - The Legacy

7/27/2019 Andy Warhol - The Legacy

1/13

Andy Warhol The Legacy


2/13

IntroductionI could say that the first time a friend told me about Andy Warhol and the

idea of Pop Art I was quite sceptical, I didnt quite know what to expect

and I wasnt able understand his enthusiasm towards this new and

apparently superficial movement. Maybe it was just my pessimistic

personality or maybe this is what the movement inspires. I am still trying

to figure this out. But I still have some optimism left to believe the answer

is easier to found that I thought, maybe it is surrounding us every day

and we dont even know it. How come? This is what I will try to figure out

in the process of elaborating this project on one of the most controversial

and fascinating artist I know.

The biggest surprise after that conversation I treated with such

superficiality, as my view on the subject was, came when the same

individual sent me some pictures later on that day. He told me that those

were some of the most famous, valuable and controversial works of art

ever made and for many, they epitomised all that they detested about

modern art. Well, that last affirmation caught my attention for sure. And

when I clicked on the first image he sent me, it struck me, this image wasincredibly familiar to me, as well as most of the others. That is the

moment I realised I knew more about this Andy Warhol than I thought. I

had been surrounded by his art all this time and I didnt even know it, until

then...

That artist, Andy Warhol, is as famous and controversial as the images he

created. Warhol was the one who predicted that in the future, everyone

would be famous for 15 minutes, and then spent his life making it come

true, exploiting the media to transform himself, and his eccentric,

beautiful entourage, into celebrities. Some even say he heralded theconsumer-led, celebrity-driven world we live in today. His influence really

does seem to be everywhere, from reality TV, to Facebook, to magazines,

even to the way music is performed. And his images are incredibly

familiar, after all, Andy Warhol's the man who painted Campbell's tomato

soup and also canonised the movie star Marilyn Monroe. But just because

his work is so widely reproduced and he's so incredibly famous, does that

mean he's actually any good?


3/13

Chapter 1

My childhood home was

the most terrible place I

had ever been.

Today, Andy Warhol is associated with

glamour, celebrity and decadence, but

his childhood was very different. His

parents were poor Slovakian immigrants

and Andrew Warhola grew up in a slum

ghetto during the Great Depression of

the '30s, when Pittsburgh was a dirty,

industrial, steelmaking city. Food was

often scarce and Andy's mum would

sometimes make soup out of water and

ketchup. A tin of Campbell's tomato

soup was a real treat.

At an early age he showed a wonderful talent for drawing. Due to anillness at the age of 8 he was confined to bed , this kept him off school for

nearly a year. It left him with the poor skin and thin hair that always

embarrassed him, and a shyness he never overcame. He became an

anxious social outcast, and almost never left his home. His mother, Julia,

used to provide him with magazines, colouring-in books, comics and cut-

out paper dolls. It's almost like the kitchen became his first artist's studio,

with his mum as his assistant. She would encourage him to make collages

and drawings and she would reward him with a chocolate bar each time

he finished one. All this influenced his work later in life.Besides doing art, the only other escape from the ghetto were the visits to

the church. He was fascinated with the he golden screens with their

Byzantine icons. This remained a rich image of his poor childhood. It

seems to me that Andy's two childhood passions, religion and the movie


4/13

stars in his magazines, later fused in his art where celebrities became

icons and the objects of worship.

All the lonely months Andy spent in the

tenements with his colouring books and

collages paid off. In 1945 Warhol won a place

at the Carnegie Institute of Technology,

where he majored in painting and design andreceived a rather unconventional artistic

education. While in school, he worked part-

time as a window dresser for a number of

department stores, making his earliest

contacts with what would become the

principal environment of his activity, namely

the world of consumption and advertising. A

week after his graduation he escaped from

the Pittsburgh ghetto and moved to New

York.

Chapter 2

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as

you do not stop.

Andy moved to New York in 1949, aged 21, with only a small suitcase and

some samples of his work. His ultimate goal was to become a famous

artist but in the meantime he had to survive somehow so he began to

make a living as an commercial illustrator. With almost no money in his

pocket, Andy moved in the Lower East Side into a dingy tenement

building. He then started to make his way thru the city looking for jobs

carrying a portfolio of his drawings in a tatty brown paper bag.

Andy's persistence began to pay off when Glamour magazine asked him

to illustrate a feature called Success is a Job in New York. They liked his

delicate drawings, with their quirky, charming figures and modern look.

Though he started to drop the a from his name occasionally during his

college days in Pittsburgh, he made it more official by signing his first

commissioned illustrations, Andy Warhol. For many years there has beenmuch speculation regarding just why he changed his name but it simply

proved easier to say.

But further success didnt come immediately for Andy Warhol. He started

to spend most of his time in a coffee-shop called Serendipity as this was a


5/13

popular place for all his favourite movie stars; Marilyn Monroe even had

her own table here. The owner of the coffee-shop was one of the first

people in New York who recognised his talent as he went there everyday

showing him his rejections. This became the place of his first exhibition ,

sold for 25 dollars which he split with the owner.

Andy's quiet demeanour masked an insatiable ambition, which along with

his talent as a commercial illustrator, soon got him noticed. He started toreceive illustration work from all of the major fashion magazines, including

Glamour, Vogue, and Harpers Bazaar. Andys blotted line technique

caught the eyes of numerous art directors. Throughout the 1950s he was

prolific in illustrating fashion ads, books, record albums and many other

promotional items. The advertising world of the 1950s groomed him well

for his venture into the art world of the 60s. It's funny how popular his

retro fifties style still is today. You see his influence everywhere, on cards,

wrapping paper, or even on kids' books like Madonna's The English Roses.

But even though he started to make more and more money his dreamremained the same.

Chapter 3I never think that people die. They just go to

department stores

For Andys work to be taken seriously as art, rather than illustration, it

had to comment on the world around him and make people look at it

differently. Artists have always painted things from their everyday lives,

and what Andy Warhol saw was America in the middle of 50s consumer

revolution so he started to create art that reflected the mass-produced

world. This is how he becam the champion of a new movement called Pop

Art. What Pop

And this is how 32 cans of soup made it onto the walls of America's most

important modern art museum. When they were first shown, most people

thought they were a joke, but they really marked the beginning of his

career as a pop artist. The bright colours, the crisp, mechanical technique,

the presentation of a series of nearly identical images, they were allthings Andy would play with again and again. Like so much of his later

work these paintings were about capitalism, the consumer society really,

they're about us. He was so drawn to doing this thing of the repetition

because our media, with all the media that we have today, it is like


6/13

repetition. To me, it seems like he really was looking forward and

foretelling what was going to happen.

Andy had begun a revolution, and what could now be classified as art

would never be the same again. If we needed any evidence that Andy

Warhol shaped the modern world, this is it.Today, nearly 50 years after

his glory days as a pop artist, his work has moved out of the gallery and

into our everyday lives. It's so strong, so reproducible, that it appears

everywhere. With Andy Warhol, high art became a brand. His art about

modern consumer culture had become part of it

Chapter 4

In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen

minutes

After he'd taken the art world by storm, Andy decided he wanted to

become a star on a much bigger stage. Through his art, Andy Warhol was

exploring the power of branding and marketing and he later realised that

to achieve his dreams of celebrity he also had to rebrand and market

himself. He needed to create a persona that will help people remember

him as well as his art. So he started to put on what he called his "Andy

Suit", which was an act he performed in public for the rest of his life.

Over night, he totally reinvented himself into the iconic, fashionable Andy

Warhol everybody knows. He also started to wear loads of different wigs

that he customised himself fact that he never actually admitted and


7/13

started to give more and more strange interviews. He cemented his image

into people's mentalities by inspiring an aura of mystery.

In 1964, Warhol opened his own art studio, a large silver-painted

warehouse known simply as "The Factory." The Factory quickly became

one of New York City's premier cultural hotspots, the scene of lavish

parties attended by the city's wealthiest socialites and celebrities. Warhol,

who clearly relished his celebrity, became a fixture at infamous New YorkCity nightclubs like Studio 54 and Max's Kansas City. Commenting on

celebrity fixation, his own and that of the public at large, Warhol

observed, "more than anything people just want stars."

Nicky Haslam, a celebrity knew Andy in the Sixties and often visited the

Silver Factory said: He did have that sort of aura that conferred a kind of

genuine happiness on to you that made you feel famous for 15 minutes. It

was like being sort of touched by the god of fame.

The

silkscreen technique


8/13

In July 1962, Andy discovered the process of silk screening. This technique

uses a specially prepared section of silk as a stencil, allowing one silk-

screen to create similar patterns multiple times, Andy Warhol would use

this technique for the rest of his life. He immediately began making

paintings of celebrities.

In August 1962, movie star Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose, and Andy

immediately decided to make a series of portraits of her. He used the

exciting new silkscreen technique which he'd discovered earlier that

summer. The 24 pictures of Marilyn would combine two of his favourite

themes - death and celebrity.

At first glance, Marilyn looks incredibly beautiful, even precious, like one

of the gold-leafed religious icons that Andy saw in church as a boy. But

something isn't right. The silkscreen allowed him to offset the layers of

paint, so the edges smudge and blur, creating an eerie, haunting quality.

The colourful mask, covering the colourless photograph, is echoing

Marilyn's glittering media-created image that hid the profound sadness

beneath.

The colours of her eyelids and lips look like make-up applied by a child.

Marilyns face is distorted, just as the media distorted her image. Theresa sadness which chimes with our knowledge of her early death. In the

Marilyns, the photograph is always the same, but the effect changes from

tragic to electrifying, from glamour to innocence, reflecting the many

masks that Marilyn wore to hide the real her.

As well as celebrity, the Marilyns are also about death, which you can see

in this other, haunting version. It fades, from colour to black and white,

almost as if she's washed away. It's like the transition of Marilyn Monroe

from this life to the next. Death and celebrity are still constantly explored

in modern art


9/13

Chapter 5

I nevere use that anymore, my new line is: Infifteen minutes everybody will be famous.

In the summer of 1963, Andy bought his first hand-held movie camera,

and started shooting films, and not long afterwards he made his first

screen tests - three-minute film portraits of Factory regulars, and beautiful

and famous visitors. People like Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dali,

everyone who was anyone in the early '60s in New York. The only thing

that Andy would tell them was to stare directly at the camera. Whatever

else they did was up to them. Using film to make art was another

important leap that Andy made, a further break from traditional art. Andy

discovered that he could manufacture celebrity,and his experiments in

film proved that he no longer had to restrict himself to paintings.

In 1965, Andy had announced

that he was going to leave

painting behind altogether and

concentrate on a whole raft of

different projects. In the same

year, he began to manage Lou

Reed and John Cale's band,

The Velvet Underground. And

this is the classic banana

record sleeve that he designed

for their album, The Velvet

Underground & Nico, which

was released in 1967.As

producer for the Velvet

Underground, Andy said he

wanted to create the biggest

discotheque in the world, combining music,film and performance.The

band played with his movies projected onto walls and his beautiful

entourage dancing. Encouraging them to let go and experiment with their

sound, Warhol created a blueprint for a new style of multimedia music

performance. They inspired musicians to really let loose with wild andoutlandish performances. You could say that the whole punk rock

movement in the '70s owed a massive debt to Warhol's Factory scene as

well.


10/13

Chapter 6

Right when I was being shot

and ever since, I knew that I was watching

television.

In June 3 1968, extremist Valerie Solanas, sole follower of the SCUMmanifest,arrived at the Factory with two guns hidden in a brown paper

bag and tried to kill Andy, by shooting him 3 times. After the incident,

Andy only commented: I was only at the wrong place, at the right time.

But the truth is, his was profoundly affected by it , after it he was

transformed himself as an artist, he smartened up his entourage and

became more interested in making as much money as he possibly could.

For the next 20 years, everything became business. Andy became a

professional party-goer, a shameless stalwart of the celebrity circuit, he

had a TV chat show, and joined a model agency, became court painter to

the rich and famous, and appeared in everything from Japanese TV

commercials to pop videos. And he even launched a celebrity magazine

called Interview becoming the the precursor to celebrity gossip magazines

like Hello, OK!.

It's ironic that, throughout his career, Andy had been fascinated by violent

death. He'd even created

an entire series

exploring the subject,known as the Death

and Disaster paintings.

One of them shows a

gruesome tabloid

photograph of a car

crash repeated 14

times in which you can

even see a corpse

slumped in thepassenger seat. It's

horrible, and completely at odds with the jaunty orange background. So

was he being heartless? In my opinion he was just being honest. He was

trying to tell us something fundamental about our times. The power of this


11/13

painting is in the repetition and by doing this, Andy wanted to imitate

what he saw happening in newspapers and on television, that unending

flow of news reports covering all sorts of catastrophes, not just car

crashes, but plane disasters and suicides.

Chapter 7

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can

ever happen to you, because someone's got to

take care of all your details.

In 1986, Andy created quite a sum of self portraits, that lots of people

described as death masks. Warhols last series of self-portraits are

among the most iconic, moving and ultimately profound works of his

entire career. Among the very last paintings he executed before he did

indeed suffer a premature and unexpected death - following complications

that arose after a routine operation on his gall bladder in February 1987 -

this series of self-portraits have consequently gained a prescience and an

uncanny sense of timeliness that has done much to reinforce the legend

of Warhol as a modern day seer. The terrifying oracle' as Calvin Tomkinsonce described him, who made visible what was happening in some part

to us all, seems here, in these works, to be foreseeing intimations of his

own death.


12/13

The end

For me, Andy Warhol redefined the role of the artist , genuinely changing

art forever. He told us that, something like a portrait can tell us so much

about ourselves, about our own obsession, our desires, about our media

saturated age. about our media-saturated age,

He took things, really banal, humble objects, like a can of tomato soup or

a Brillo box, and made it question the very nature of art. He took art out of

the gallery and into the world around us, into so many different fields like

music or film, publishing even, and in doing that, he freed up other artists

to do exactly the same.

I think the that perhaps weve moved beyond the idea that artists can

only make paintings or artists have to be sincere, they have to suffer.

Artists can now, thanks to Warhol, inhabit a whole different realm ofactivities and personas, and that's what we wanted to look at. I think

that's Andy Warhol's indisputable legacy. He threw open the doors, and

now, in art, anything goes.

He may indeed have sold out in later life and bought into the celebrity

circus, and you can even question his motivations, but there's no denying

the incredible impact his work has had on our modern world.


13/13

Documents

Andy Warhol - The Legacy