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Andy Warhol, the American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and film
maker was born in Pittsburgh on August 6, 1928, shortly afterwards
settling in New York. The only son of immigrant, Czech parents, Andy
finished high school and went on to the Carnegie Institute of
Technology in Pittsburgh, graduating in 1949 with hopes of becoming an
art teacher in the public schools.
While in Pittsburgh, he worked for a
department store arranging window displays, and often was asked to
simply look for ideas in fashion magazines . While recognizing the job
as a waste of time, he recalls later that the fashion magazines “gave
me a sense of style and other career opportunities.”
Upon graduating,
Warhol moved to New York and began his artistic career as a commercial
artist and illustrator for magazines and newspapers. Although extremely
shy and clad in old jeans and sneakers, Warhol attempted to intermingle
with anyone at all who might be able to assist him in the art world.
His portfolio secure in a brown paper bag, Warhol introduced himself
and showed his work to anyone that could help him out.
Eventually, he
got a job with Glamour magazine, doing illustrations for an article
called “Success is a Job in New York,” along with doing a spread
showing women’s shoes. Proving his reliability and skills, he acquired
other such jobs, illustrating adds for Harpers Bazaar, Millers Shoes,
contributing to other large corporate image-building campaigns, doing
designs for the Upjohn Company, the National Broadcasting Company and
others.
In these early drawings, Warhol used a device that would prove
beneficial throughout his commercial art period of the 1950’s-a
tentative, blotted ink line produced by a simple monotype process.
First he drew in black ink on glazed, nonabsorbent paper. Then he would
press the design against an absorbent sheet. As droplets of ink spread,
gaps in the line filled in-or didn’t, in which case they created a look
of spontaneity. Warhol mastered thighs method, and art directors of the
1950’s found in adaptable to nearly any purpose.
This method functioned
provided him with a hand-scale equivalent of a printing press, showing
his interest in mechanical reproduction that dominates much of his
future work. Such techniques used for almost all of his works derived
from his beginning in the commercial arts. His pattern of aesthetic and
artistic innovation, to “expect the unexpected,” began with his
advertising art in the 1950’s.
Much of his future subject matter can be
placed in the realm of such common, everyday objects, that were focused
on in these early times. Nearly all of Warhol’s works relate in one way
or another to the commercially mass-produced machine product. Hence,
Warhol’s future artwork and techniques were greatly influenced by his
rather humble beginnings.
Although Warhol did receive recognition for
much of his commercial illustrations during those times, he was
constantly pursuing another career as well-that of a serious artist.
Unfortunately, Warhol was not so successful at first in obtain this
goal. His delicate ink drawings of shoes and cupids, among various
others, had no place in a decade dominated by such heroic artists as
William de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
Warhol And Pop Art
Pop Art emerged in the US in the early 1960’s, at first completely
unacknowledged. During it’s beginning, Pop Art was often seen as an
insult to the roles of such artists as Pollock and de Kooning, who were
leading a revival of Abstract Expressionist, “an abrupt and conspicuous
dialectical reaction to a great wave of abstraction,” at mid-century.
Emerging with considerable fanfare, mainly condemnation, but by
1963-64, it suddenly began being extensively exhibited, published, and
consumed as a cultural phenomenon By the early 60’s, Warhol became
determined to establish himself as a serious painter, as well as to
gain the respect of such famous artists of the time such as Jasper
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he had recently come to know
and admire. He began by painting a series of pictures based on crude
advertisements and on images from comic strips. These first such works,
such as ‘Saturday’s Popeye’(1960) and ‘Water Heater”(1960), were
loosely painted in a “mock-expressive” style that mocked the gestural
brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, and are among the first examples
of what came to be known as Pop Art.
Warhol’s works during the early
60’s are among those for which he is best known for. He reproduced
advertisements and cartoons, as well as such familiar household items
as telephones and soup cans, often painting one image repeatedly in a
grid design. Many of these works, such as his pictures of dollar bills
and soup cans, as in ‘Cambell’s Soup Cans 200”(1962), show many ideas
underlying advertising, as well as showing his interest in techniques
that enabled multiplication of an image, such as silk-screen printing,
techniques that dominated much of his work.
Through these works Warhol
gained his much desired recognition, becoming an instant celebrity,
having gone from respected commercial illustrator to controversial and
influential artist. Such Pop Art images as Warhol’s soup cans and
Lichtenstein’s comic book panels jumped from the vast American consumer
culture into the realm of high artistic and aesthetic recognition. It
is not known whether Lichtenstein or Warhol was the first to displace
commercial images from the media to modernist painting, but Warhol, of
all the founding Pop artists, first and foremost, consistently “hewed
to the canons of Pop technique and iconography.”
These first Pop works,
in their intentional exclusion of all conventional signs of
personality, in their obvious rejection of innovation and their blatant
vulgarity, were somewhat brutal and shocking, designed with the
intention of offending an audience “accustomed to thinking of art as an
intimate medium for conveying emotion.” Warhol further extended these
concerns by using techniques that gave his images a printed appearance,
using stencils, rubber stamps, and hand-cut silkscreens, along with in
his choice of subject-matter. He used the shocking images of tabloids,
as in ‘129 Die in Jet’ to money, in a series of screenprinted paintings
representing rows of dollar bills, and to the products of consumer
society, including Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Cambell’s Soup.
Thus,
the once struggling commercial illustrator transformed into one of the
most recognized and influential artists of the century, considered the
“progenitor of American Pop Art.”
Death And Disaster
In the summer of 1962, Warhol’s friend Henry Geldzahler laid out a
copy the Daily News while the two were having lunch. On the cover, the
headline was “129 Die in Jet.” According to Warhol, that is what began
a series of paintings depicting rather gruesome images of human death
and disaster, with subjects ranging from the personal focus of
individual suicide, the banality of everyday disaster, death by legal
execution, to the historical death of political assassination,
culminating with the most destructive instrument the world has ever
known-the atom bomb.
Together, these works are among the most shocking
and disturbing works of art the world has ever known. In most of these
works, Warhol displays death as an ever-present subject. His first
silkscreened death and disaster paintings were of suicides and
especially gruesome car crashes, such as in ‘Ambulance Disaster” and
“Saturday Disaster.” the power and suffering shown in the images
stunning viewers. Like the contaminated canned food shown in “Tunafish
Disaster,” these images appear to represent a breach of faith in the
products of the Industrial Revolution by showing consumes products
embraced by the population that backfire and cause death.
Warhol
retained the images from clippings of newspapers, magazines, and
photographs, altering them only slightly, as was his norm, to show the
images as they were, everyday occurrences the public accepts yet
forgets, forcing the viewer to take them at face value. They portray “A
stark, disabused, pessimistic vision of American life, produced from
the knowing rearrangement of pulp materials by an artist who did not
opt for the easier paths of irony or condescension.”
Among the most
iconic Death and Disaster images in the “Electric Chair.”(1963)
According to Warhol, his replication of this image, both within the
single composition and from painting to painting, was intended to
“empty” the image of it’s meaning. The electric chair is shown from the
front, fully visible, showing a sign reading “SILENCE,” the sign
exclamating the emptiness of the execution chamber. The image, the
chamber empty , showing only the sign, represents death as an absence
and complete silence, a complete void.
This notion was characteristic
of Warhol, who once said “I never understood why when you died, you
didn’t just vanish and everything could just keep going the way it was,
only you just wouldn’t be there,” and who often stated that he wanted a
blank tombstone when he died. Many wonder why Warhol chose such imagery
to focus on, and he himself gives little reason.
For some of these
works, in which he shows images repeated relatively unchanged, he was
attempting to lessen the shock of the viewer, recognizing such events
for their face value, as everyday occurrences. “When you see a gruesome
picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have and effect.” As in
the “Jackies,” images of the recently assassinated President Kennedy’s
grieving widow, were repeated to reinforce the obsessive ways that our
thoughts keep returning to a tragedy, and “stress the flash of fame
these little known(suicides) victims achieve in death. This can be said
to be consistent with Warhols claim that everyone “will be famous for
15 minutes.” In this, does he mean by tragedy?
Others claim the initial
context for these subjects was journalistic- as an artist trained in
drawing and pictorial design, he was obviously predisposed to consider
the front page of the news and other media items in visual , artistic
terms-as a “media junkie” who continually pursued and collected printed
matter, he was drawn into a network of “sensationalized intimacies with
the protagonists of the news.”
Regardless, there is a tie between these
images and his celebrity portraits. Warhol took up the theme of suicide
shortly after his first meditations on Marilyn Monroe’s death. While
doing those works, he said to have realized that “everything I was
doing must have been death.” Thus, the idea of death was not a new one
for him, and thereby his choice of subject matter may not have been
completely random. Throughout the Death and Disaster paintings, Warhol
makes use of background color to serve various functions.
Mostly,
throughout the series, he avoids the use of primary colors, using
mainly secondaries, such as oranges, lavenders, and pinks, the types of
colors “you would expect to find in a wallpaper store.” His use of
background color in the Death and Disaster paintings is mostly
extrinsic to the content of the images. In some, such as “Lavender
Disaster,” the background color seems to intensify the effect of
alienation created by the realism of the visual content. In others,
such as “Atomic Bomb,” the red-orange color serves a supporting role.
The images Warhol selected for these paintings were gruesome, though he
showed again his brilliant eye for such images so effective in shocking
the viewer. “With an eye for the eccentricity of an individual event,
Warhol’s paintings capture the unpredictable choreography of death.”
Using a broad range of images, from car crashes, suicides, burn
victims, funerals, riots, to the culmination with the atomic bomb,
Warhol succeeded in giving the viewer what one expected of Warhol; to
expect the unexpected.
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