Andy Warhol

(American, 1928-1987)

“I think everybody should like everybody.”
— Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, the most famous of the Pop Artists, was an irreplaceable player in defining the shape the art movement took, making it popular, and deeply affecting general culture. He marked the beginning of the post-war era, helping America get free from the grip of WWII. Pop art saturated the 1960s, meshing with the lifestyle of its time more thoroughly than any aesthetic movement of the twentieth century. Pop Art artists wanted to make art for the masses, feeling that earlier art was elitist. Everyday life inspired them, and commercial products entered into the highly valued fine art space. Warhol’s paintings of Campbell's Soup cans pushed Pop Art to the front of the art scene. Warhol's impassive depictions of objects, like the Coca Cola bottle, are a serendipitous intersection of art and commercial branding, resulting in a landmark moment in American popular culture and a conversion in the way contemporary art was made.

Andy was born Andrew Warhola on August 6 of 1928 in a two-room apartment in a working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His Slovakian immigrant parents, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons, Paul, John, and Andy, who was the youngest. They were devout Byzantine Catholics; his father was a construction worker, and his mother an embroiderer. When Warhol was 8 years old, he developed Sydenham Chorea, a neurological disorder commonly known as St. Vitus’ dance, characterized by jerky, involuntary movements. The serious, and sometimes fatal, nervous system illness left him bedridden for months, and his mother, a skilled artist herself, gave him his first drawing lessons while he was sick. Drawing became a favorite pastime, he was also a fan of movies, reading comics and Hollywood magazines, and playing with paper cutouts. Growing up in Pittsburgh in the Great Depression, luxuries were scarce, but his parents bought him his first camera when he was eight years old. He created a darkroom in their basement to develop the film, and took free art classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh while in elementary school. When he was 14 years old, his father died, deeply affecting Andy who was too upset to attend his father’s wake. Ondrej’s confidence in his son’s art had been so great that in his will, he made sure his life savings went toward Andy’s college education. Warhol attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology where he studied pictorial design and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1949.

The artist moved to New York City and dropped the “a” at the end of his last name. He was a talented and skilled graphic designer and illustrator. He quickly landed a job with Glamour magazine and his reputation expanded; his whimsical style and blotted line technique won him many awards. As equally as he was an artist, Warhol was an entrepreneur, and his success brought considerable revenue to finance his further artistic ventures.

In the 1950s, Warhol worked hard, refined his blotted-line ink drawing process, and began doing more painting. In 1961, Pop Art was formally introduced. Warhol’s 1961 Coca-Cola [2] shows that his transition from hand-painted works to silkscreens was an organic development and not a cold leap from one to the other. The artist began his photographic silkscreen printing, his most recognizable style, in 1962. This process allowed him to easily reproduce the images that he appropriated from popular culture using commercial processes. Among Warhol’s first photographic silkscreen works are his paintings of Marilyn Monroe. In ‘62, he began a large series of celebrity portraits and made his series of Campbell’s Soup Cans, exhibiting them in his first solo pop art exhibition at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The 1950s and ‘60s, a time before gay liberation, also saw Warhol be the first postwar artist to put emphasis on gay and queer identity in his work and life. In 1963, Warhol began his series of Death and Disaster paintings and his box sculptures, replicas of large supermarket product boxes, and he produced a range of films between 1963 and 1968. In 1964, he moved the studio to a large loft in midtown Manhattan, which he and friends decorated with silver paint and aluminum foil and called it the Silver Factory. It became a famous creative hub for parties, and experimentation with everything from art and music to drug use. He got into performance art in 1966, debuting his traveling cinematic multimedia performance, Exploding Plastic Inevitable, featuring The Velvet Underground and Nico, which was an immersive experience with live music, lighting effects, projected film footage, and live dancers. Losing the lease on the Silver Factory space in 1967, he relocated to a sixth floor space in the Union Square West area of Manhattan.

A life-altering event occurred the next year. Valerie Solanas, a writer and extreme radical, even for the New York avant-garde, came into the studio on June 3rd, and fired at Andy with a pistol in close range, missing twice and hitting him the third time, nearly taking his life. She had made an appearance in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967), and seemed to believe there was a conspiracy against her related to him not using a script she had written. Solanas was arrested after the incident, plead guilty, and was declared mentally unstable. The near-fatal shooting scarred Warhol physically and emotionally. She damaged eight organs, leaving his stomach and torso disfigured. Numerous surgeries followed, and Andy was required to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life. The event also significantly altered his work practice, moving it from an extremely collaborative and experimental approach to a much more guarded one. Three years later, they released Solanas from the New York State Prison for Women, but she stalked Warhol and others over the phone and was arrested again in November 1971. She would be institutionalized several times and then drift into obscurity. For the rest of his life, Warhol lived in fear that Solanas would attack him again, living on such high alert that he couldn’t be touched without jumping, but he didn’t stop working. Among other projects, he published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) in 1975.

In the later part of the artist’s life, he suffered from problems with his gall bladder and ultimately had it removed. Two days later, he appeared to be recovering from the procedure, but died suddenly of cardiac arrest on February 22, 1987. Thousands of people attended the artist’s memorial in New York City. The multi-faceted, prolific artist illustrated, painted, and continually pushed himself and his contemporaries to experiment in new media including publishing, film, music production, television, fashion, and theater, frequently collaborating with artists and brands. Warhol successfully balanced commercial and entrepreneurial endeavors with avant-garde, underground work. He is one of the most influential pop artists of all time; his pieces are some of the most recognizable images ever made. His culture is widely used and known worldwide. His works are some of the most highly priced and sought after in the history of art. Like his energy, his legacy is unstoppable, even decades later.

American Fine Art, Inc. is proud to feature the original works and limited editions of Andy Warhol. Visit our 12,000 sq. ft. showroom in Scottsdale, Arizona or call today. Our website is offered only as a limited place to browse or refresh your memory and is not a reflection of our current inventory. To learn more about collecting, pricing, value, or any other art information, please contact one of our International Art Consultants. We look forward to giving you the one on one attention you deserve when building your fine art collection. We hope you find our website helpful and look forward to seeing you in Scottsdale soon.