If you ever see the paintings of this amazing artist Andy Warhol, you will never forget them. Somewhere in the depths of your memory there will definitely remain memories of his unusual, but very vivid paintings. But not everyone who is familiar with his paintings knows about the artist’s very personality. Andy Warhol is a very mysterious figure, one of the most famous, but at the same time the most controversial. The works of this master became a bright triumph and commercial success of American pop art. He was everything he was: an artist, sculptor, designer, director, producer, writer, collector. Even from his own life, this unusual artist made a work of art, creating ever new myths about his legendary person.
About the parents of the future artist
A talented personality, known today throughout the world, was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), into a large family of immigrants who moved to America from Eastern Europe. Warhol Andy, and his real name is Andrey Warhola, was the youngest, fourth child. He had two older brothers and a sister who died before his parents moved to the United States. The most reliable data indicates that the birthplace of the Warhol family is Slovakia. Although three countries consider this extraordinary artist theirs - besides Slovakia, these are the USA and Ukraine. But one thing is unmistakably clear - his legacy belongs to the whole world, and not to a single country. Andy Warhol's parents had nothing to do with art. My father was a coal mine worker, my mother, not knowing English, was forced to earn extra money by cleaning and also selling paper flowers she made with her own hands.
Andy Warhol's childhood
While still very young, Andy began to get sick often. From 4 to 8 years old, he suffered more than one serious illness, among them the most terrible disease was Sydenham's chorea, or "St. Vitus's dance." The boy suffered from seizures and was literally bedridden. At school he becomes an outcast. The child also became too suspicious and began to be afraid of hospitals and doctors. This fear did not let him go until his death. During this difficult time, Andy Warhol played with cut-out dolls and listened to the radio. The mother then drew different pictures for her son, and gradually he himself began to draw all sorts of objects surrounding him, as well as make collages from old newspapers. So, even in early childhood, Andy developed his first interest, and then his love for drawing. Somewhat later, Warhol’s mother, having earned some money, bought her son a small film projector, through which he watched stories in pictures on the wall of the room. Thus, in childhood, the creative potential of the future artist begins to gradually develop. When Andy turned 9 years old, he began attending art courses, which were taught free of charge. At the age of 13, the boy loses his father, who dies in a mine.
Warhol's education
While still in school, the young man planned to enter the University of Pittsburgh, and after receiving an art education there, teach drawing. But after graduating from school, plans change; Andy Warhol enters the Carnegie Institute of Technology. His plans include a career as a commercial illustrator. In 1949, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Graphic Design department. The future artist studied well, was even the best in the course, but did not always find a common language with both fellow students and teachers. He always had an active life position. At this time, Andy attends parties, concerts of symphony orchestras, and is interested in ballet.
The beginning of your career
After graduating from college and receiving a diploma, young Warhol moved to New York. He, like other pop art artists, began his working career as an artist of conventional advertising. The young man began decorating shop windows, making advertising posters, drawing holiday cards, and also decorating stands. A little later, he begins a fruitful collaboration with such popular glossy magazines as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and other lesser-known publications. Thanks to these magazines, their illustrator, Andy Warhol, also becomes famous. The biography of his life at this stage is marked by great upswing financially, but Warhol dreams of “high art.”
Andy Warhole. Creation. First success
The beginning of the 50s is marked in the biography of the extraordinary artist with the first noticeable success. It all happened after he came up with a shoe advertisement for the I. Miller company. Everyone liked Warhol's eccentric style of painting. He depicted specially made blots on shoes drawn in ink. This was a revolution in the world of advertising, and for Andy it was the first creative success, which brought him new lucrative contracts. Soon the artist Andy Warhol begins to earn more than 100 thousand dollars a year. And 1952 is the year when the first exhibition took place at which his works were presented. The exhibition took place in New York, and four years later Warhol was accepted into the “Art Editors Club.” Very soon he begins to create his own paintings, which he builds using an unusual method - screen printing. So he also became interested in photography, but Andy gave a special place in his life to fine art.
Andy Warhol is an extraordinary artist. His calling card
An incident that became fateful helped Warhol to establish himself as an artist who sees art in a very unusual way. Putting his own spin on an art dealer's idea, Andy creates a series of paintings of tomato soup cans and dollar bills.
An exhibition of these paintings in one of the galleries in New York created a real sensation, and the image of Campbell's canned food would later become his calling card. The artist's imagination has no limits. What else will this strange young man Andy Warhol come up with? He begins to create his paintings using silk-screen printing techniques. It allows you to repeat the same thing many times, the same images, the same strokes. This monotonous repetition is what Warhol strove for. This will be a characteristic feature of his work.
Creating your own factory
In 1963, Andy Warhol and his friends decided to create their own studio or workshop. To do this, he acquires an abandoned old building in the very center of New York, which will become his creative studio. Andy comes up with a simple, unpretentious name for it: Factory. It was a springboard of sorts where the famous master created and presented his works. Warhol Andy hires a team of young creative artists. Their task is to stream the works of a recognized master. The factory became a real commercial enterprise, producing about 80 silk-screen prints per day, and this number amounted to thousands of works per year. Having established work on mass production, Andy Warhol made paintings and portraits of celebrities a symbol of pop art and the artistic culture of America in the twentieth century, but purely commercial. This studio operated for over twenty years and was considered the craziest place on earth. Permissiveness reigned there, where they not only painted, made films, and produced mass silk-screen prints, but also where his creative team lived and held parties.
About the artist's personal life
What was this eccentric, unconventional and even strange Andy Warhol really like? His work was distinguished by its boldness and shockingness; it was underground, three-dimensional, created like a film. This image of him as a superstar was open to the public, in contrast to his personal life, which Andy tried to keep secret. It is not surprising that his personality was of great interest to the public. Warhol was at the center of the New York art scene for several decades. However, in fact, Andy was a great eccentric, a modest, even private person, and towards the end of his life, even a deeply religious person. Many researchers of the artist’s life and work consider him a homosexual, finding confirmation not only in his behavior, but even in his work: a series of paintings and several films. Warhol is credited with such boyfriends as John Giorno, Billy Name, John Gould, and Jed Johnson. But Andy Warhol still had a real muse.
This is Edie Sedgwick, a model and actress who once came to see him at the Factory and completely enchanted him. There were rumors that they were having an affair. They were like two halves of one whole. But Edie abused drugs, which is why her life was cut short at the age of 28. Whether Andy Warhol, whose personal life was so closely connected with this queen of Manhattan, regretted this is unknown. But there is no doubt that she was his muse.
The last days of Warhol's life. His work today
Andy Warhol was assassinated in 1968 by his former Factory model Valerie Solan. He had a clinical death, but he survived, although he changed a lot after that. He died in a New York hospital on February 22, 1987, in his sleep. Today he is considered the main artist of the late twentieth century. Films are made about him, books are written, and exhibitions are organized. Warhol's fortune, estimated at one hundred million, was bequeathed by him to his own foundation, which supports arts organizations. Today, Pittsburgh houses the Andy Warhol Museum, which opened in 1994. Its collection includes 4258 exhibits: 900 works of painting, a series of silk-screen prints, graphic works, photographs, sculptures, video works and films.
Andy Warhol is a cult figure for the entire world of contemporary art. He ranks first on the list of best-selling artists. Some of his works are sold at auctions for more than, for example, the works of Pablo Picasso. We present to your attention a selection of his works, sold for record sums.
1. "Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)" (1963) - $105.4 million
Warhol's work from the famous large-scale series of 1963 "Death and Disaster". In November 2013, it was sold at Sotheby's in New York for a record $105,445,000, the second highest ever paid for a work of contemporary art in history.
2. "Eight Elvises" (1963) - $100 million
In October 2008, Warhol's Eight Elvises was sold to a private collection for $100 million, a record at the time for his work.
3. "Turquoise Marilyn" (1964) - $80 million
In May 2007, the painting, one of several portraits of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol, was acquired by collector Steven A. Cohen for an estimated price of $80 million.
4. "Green Car Crash (Green Car Burning 1)" (1963) - $71.7 million
In May 2007, this painting was sold at Christie's in New York for $71.7 million to collector Philippa Niarchos, son of Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos.
5. "The Men in Her Life" (1962) - $63.4 million
In 2010, a black-and-white image of Elizabeth Taylor with her third husband Mike Todd and future husband Eddie Fisher sold to an anonymous buyer at a Phillips de Pury & Co auction in New York for $63.4 million.
6. "Coca-Cola" (1962) - $57.2 million
This large piece was hand-painted by Andy Warhol. Sold at Christie's in New York for $57,285,000 in November 2013.
7. "Two Hundred One Dollar Bills" (1962) - $43.8 million
In November 2009, the painting was sold at Sotheby's to an anonymous buyer for $43.8 million. Its previous owner was London collector Pauline Karpidas, who bought the work in 1986 for only $385 thousand.
8. "The Statue of Liberty" (1962) - $43.7 million
In November 2012, a large silkscreen of the famous American monument was sold at Christie's in New York for $43,762,500.
9. Big Coke - $35.36 million
The painting was sold in November 2010 at Sotheby's in New York for $35.36 million. The work was purchased by hedge fund manager Steve Cohen.
10. Self-Portrait (1986) - $32.5 million
In May 2010, a large self-portrait of Andy Warhol, painted in 1986, just a year before his death, was sold at Sotheby's in New York for $32.56 million.
Andy Warhol he is considered a fellow countryman both in Ukraine and Slovakia, despite the fact that he is an American both by passport and place of birth. The artist, producer, designer, writer and one of the main ideologists of pop art was born and raised in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) in a family of Rusyn immigrants. Rusyns are a people living in the Carpathian Mountains, mainly in the territory of modern Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine, and who often do not identify themselves with either one, or the other, or the third. So, Andrei’s parents (yes, exactly, Andrei) immigrated to the United States from Slovakia. In 1928, a fourth child was born into their family, who was destined to become one of the “idols” of the counterculture of the 60s.
As a child, Andrei, at that time already Andrew, fell ill with chorea. A terrible disease, which is sometimes also called “St. Vitus’s dance,” confined the boy to bed for a long time. During his illness, one of Warhol's pastimes was drawing and making collages from newspaper clippings. It was at this time that his original artistic taste began to form.
Further, the story of a young man named Andrew Warhol is reminiscent of American cinema. He graduates from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and becomes a specialist in graphic design. In 1949 he moved to New York, where he shortened his last name to Warhol. In 1950, he carried out successful advertising for the shoe company I. Miller", after which he was invited to RCA Records to develop the design of record covers. This is how Warhol enters the world of music. The scope of his talents in the post-war “big anthill” turned out to be very extensive.
In the early 60s, Andy Warhol became one of the most extravagant and, at the same time, paid designers in New York. His fees are growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, Warhol's approach to art was innovative and revolutionary. Unbridled imagination pushed the artist to the most daring experiments, but representatives of the “old school” were, to put it mildly, shocked by his work, which was constantly criticized.
New York in the 50s and 60s found itself at the center of a cultural revolution, when old art seemed dead to many, and new art was just emerging. During these years, America lay low in anticipation of great cultural changes.
All this gave rise to the advent of the beatniks and the era of rock and roll, and contributed in the best possible way to the emergence of interest in the work of various kinds of art freaks, which certainly includes Warhol himself. Not, of course, in the sense that the creations of freaks represent monstrosity, but in the meaning given to this term when applied to art, that is, characterizing bright, unusual, extravagant, shocking creativity, accompanied by a rejection of cultural and social stereotypes.
In 1962, Andy Warhol opened his own art studio, “Factory,” in Manhattan, where he did another amazing and shocking thing - he put art on the conveyor belt. The "factory" was an organized production with a plan and hired workers, producing up to 80 printed works per day. Experiments in Warhol’s art studio gave rise to the term “business art” and the corresponding movement in art.
As part of this project, Warhol implemented the ideas of screen printing. The image reproduction method, also known as silk-screen printing, involved transferring a photograph enlarged using a projector onto canvas, paper, or other material, and then hand-finishing the image into its final form.
The factory attracted many famous, influential and wealthy people who wanted to capture themselves in all the glory of modern art. This brought considerable profit to the author. When printing portraits, Warhol made certain corrections to the image: he removed unnecessary things, highlighted the eyes, and removed wrinkles. For an advertising campaign aimed at attracting wealthy clients, a special slogan was invented: “the best face from Warhol.” One of the features of Warhol's signature style was the technique of repeating the same image in different colors.
A new approach to art, as well as noisy parties in the company of the brightest representatives of New York bohemia, contributed to the fact that Warhol’s name migrated to the gossip columns for a long time.
The revolutionary spirit of the 60s rebelled extremely violently against the traditions of consumer society that had developed in America over the past decades, and here Warhol’s creations came in handy. Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Coca-Cola and Campbell's rice-tomato soup, packaging containers for Heinz ketchup and Brillo washing powder - all this very ironically showed the bourgeois foundations of modern society.
In 1965, Warhol became the manager of the rock group Velvet Underground. He also introduces his friend Nico into the band as a vocalist. Andy Warhol also created the cover of the Velvet Underground's debut album with the famous banana.
In 1968, an attempt was made on the famous designer's life. He suffered clinical death, survived and continued to experiment with various forms of art, but the “era of the Factory of the 60s” ended there.
The 70s, compared to the 60s, were more than quiet for Warhol. At this time, he created a number of portraits of famous personalities, thereby further enhancing his reputation and gaining new patrons. In 1979, he became one of the founders of the New York Academy of Art.
In February 1987, Andy Warhol was admitted to a New York hospital, where he underwent a simple operation to remove his gallbladder. During post-operative sleep, the artist's heart stopped.
Surprisingly, at world auctions the prices for Andy Warhol's works are still significantly higher than the prices for classics. Glamor, one of the ideologists of which was the famous designer, is still in great demand. History played a rather cruel joke on Warhol and other representatives of pop art, transferring their revolutionary ideas to the philistine level.
Andy Warhol, real name - Andrew Warhola (Rusyn. Andriy Vargola). Born August 6, 1928 - died February 22, 1987. American artist, producer, designer, writer, collector, magazine publisher and film director, a cult figure in the history of the pop art movement and modern art in general. The founder of the “homo universale” ideology, the creator of works that are synonymous with the concept of “commercial pop art”.
In the 1960s, he managed and produced the first alternative rock band, The Velvet Underground. Several feature films and documentaries have been made about Warhol's life.
Andrew Warhola was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA) as the fourth child in a working-class family of Ruthenian immigrants from the village of Mikova near Stropkova in the northeast of modern Slovakia, part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The first child, daughter Justina, born in Slovakia, died before moving to the USA. Warhol's father Andrei immigrated to the United States in search of work in 1914, and his mother Julia (nee Zavatskaya) joined him in 1921, after the death of Warhol's grandparents. Members of a deeply religious family were parishioners of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church. Warhol's father worked in a coal mine, his mother, who did not speak English, worked part-time by washing windows and cleaning, and also made and sold flowers from tin cans and corrugated paper. By 1934, the Warhols had moved from the slums to a more comfortable area. The family lived at 55 Belen Street and then at 3252 Dawson Street in Oakland, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Andy had two older brothers, Paul (Paul), born in 1923, and John, born in 1925. Paul's son, James Warhol, became an illustrator of children's books.
In the third grade, Warhol contracted Sydenham's chorea, also called St. Witta", which was a consequence of a previous scarlet fever, after which he was bedridden most of the time. He becomes an outcast in class. Suspiciousness appeared, and a fear of doctors and hospitals developed (which would not let him go until he died). While he is bedridden, he begins to enjoy drawing, collecting photographs of movie stars and making collages from newspaper clippings. Warhol himself later mentioned this period as very important in the development of his personality, developing skills, artistic taste and preferences.
When Andy was 13 years old, his father died in a mining accident. Warhol graduated from Schenley High School in 1945.
He planned to get an art education at the University of Pittsburgh and then teach drawing. But then plans changed, and he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology, hoping to make a career as a commercial illustrator. In 1949, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in graphic design. He did well in his studies, but often did not find a common language with teachers and fellow students.
After graduating in 1949, he moved to New York, where he began working as a store window designer, drawing postcards and advertising posters. Later, he was hired as an illustrator for the magazines Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and several other less popular publications. During this period, he Americanized his last name, starting to write it without the last letter a - “Warhol”.
Already by 1950, success came after the successful design of advertising for the shoe company “I. Miller." Advertising posters featured eccentrically drawn shoes with ink and specially made blots. In the mid-1950s, Warhol illustrated Margarita Madrigal's Spanish language self-instruction book, which marked the beginning of her series of best-selling self-instruction books, which were reprinted many times.
In 1962, Warhol held his first major exhibition, which brought him popularity. By this time, Warhol was able to buy his own house in Manhattan, on East 33rd Street. His income rose to the level of 100 thousand dollars a year, and this gave him the opportunity to become more interested in what he loved - drawing, and to dream of “high art”.
In 1956 he received an honorary prize from the Art Editors Club.
Warhol was one of the first to use screen printing as a method for creating paintings. In his early silkscreens he used his own hand-drawn images. Later, using a projector, he transferred photographs onto the canvas and manually traced the image. The use of the silkscreen method was one of the stages in Warhol's desire for mass reproduction and circulation of works of art, despite all criticism, who wrote about the loss of aura and value of a work in the age of its technical reproducibility.
Warhol's method was as follows: a nylon mesh was stretched over the frame. The image itself on the grid was created by contact illumination. A transparency was placed on a grid impregnated with photographic emulsion. Everything was illuminated, as if printed in photographs. In the illuminated areas of the grid, the photoemulsion polymerized and became an insoluble film. The excess was washed off with water. This is how the matrix, that is, the printing form, was created. It was placed on paper or fabric and paint was applied. The paint penetrated through the transparent areas of the mesh and created an image. Thus, applying black paint with a special rubber roller on a wooden handle, Warhol executed the main outline of his most famous works: repeated works by Elizabeth Taylor and others. Multicolor printing required a number of matrices equal to the number of colors. One set of matrices was enough for a large number of images. The introduction of innovative technologies into the process of creating images put art on a commercial basis.
In the 1960s, the artist used photographs published in the media for his work. Beginning in the 1980s, he took photographs himself with a Polaroid camera.
In 1960, Warhol created designs for Coca-Cola cans, which brought him fame as an artist with an extraordinary vision of art. In the early sixties, Warhol became increasingly involved in graphics, creating mainly only works depicting dollar bills.
Already in 1952, Warhol's works were presented at an exhibition in New York, and in 1956 he received an honorary prize from the Art Editors Club. By this time, the artist was earning about one hundred thousand dollars a year, but did not stop dreaming of “high art.”
In 1960, Warhol painted his first piece from the Coca-Cola series. In 1960-1962, a series of works depicting Campbell’s Soup Cans appeared. Initially, posters with cans of soup were made using the painting technique: “Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato Rice), 1961, and since 1962 - using the silk-screen printing technique (“Thirty-two cans of Campbell's soup,” “ One Hundred Cans of Campbell's Soup", "Two Hundred Cans of Campbell's Soup" - all 1962). Also, in 1962, a turning point for himself, Warhol created the series "Green Bottles of Coca-Cola". Drawings of cans in bright colors became Warhol's "calling card". The display of works at an exhibition in the gallery "Stabl" caused a great resonance among the public. Although, according to critics, these paintings reflected the facelessness and vulgarity of mass consumer culture, the mentality of Western civilization. After this exhibition, Warhol was ranked among the representatives of pop art and conceptual art, such like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.
Starting from this period, Warhol, as a photographer and artist, worked with images of pop and film stars: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and, as well as with images of politicians, for example, Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy and (“Red Lenin”, "Black Lenin") After Monroe passed away, he created his famous “Marilyn Diptych,” which became an allegory of the life and death of the actress. As of 2011, the Marilyn Diptych is on display at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. On December 2, 2004, The Guardian newspaper published a list of the 500 most outstanding works of contemporary art, where this work by Warhol takes an honorable third place. Warhol had a distinctive, ever-changing approach to painting. One of the innovations was the use of acid-colored paints.
In 1963, Warhol bought a building in Manhattan, the building was named “Factory”, and here Andy started creating works of contemporary art. In 1964, the first exhibition of Warhol's art objects that did not fit into the framework of the concept of painting took place. The exposition consisted of displaying about a hundred copies of cardboard packaging containers, boxes of Heinz ketchup and Brillo washing powder. On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition, Warhol gave a presentation of his new unusual studio, “Factory”, the walls of which were painted silver. There was a permissive atmosphere in the studio, and parties were held. This room violated the idea of the artist’s studio as a secluded place. The “factory” and its owner began to often appear in gossip column reports, and they began to be written about in magazines and the media. Warhol also created his own project - the Interview magazine, where celebrities interviewed celebrities.
The "factory" was an organized production that produced up to 80 printed works per day, that is, several thousand prints per year. A team of workers was hired to mass produce mass-produced reproductions of celebrity portraits. Warhol photographed the heroes of his replicated works in his studio, taking a series of Polaroid snapshots. The best one was selected from many frames, enlarged, and transferred to canvas using silk-screen printing. The surface of the canvas was covered with paint either before reproduction, or Warhol applied oil paint over the already reproduced print. Usually several versions of one work were made. In this way, Warhol turned art into “business art,” directing performers who technically reproduced his own work.
Warhol was of the opinion that celebrities in portraits had to look perfect and without flaws: the painting "Before and After" from the series "Advertising" (1960), gave the announcement of a "new face from Warhol", supposedly "an improved version of yourself." He retouched wrinkles and facial skin defects, removed excess chins, painted on eyes and lips brighter, giving faces idealized features. Among Warhol's clients are the entire family of the Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Diana Ross, Brigitte Bardot and many other celebrities.
In parallel with the creation of pop art objects, Warhol began making films, but as a director he achieved success only in narrow circles. Between 1963 and 1968, Warhol made several hundred films, including 472 four-minute black-and-white portrait screen tests (Screen Tests), dozens of short films and more than 150 feature films, only 60 of which were released.
Most of his films made during this period had no plot. The storylines were based on pseudo-documentary footage, for example: “a man tries on underpants.” The main point of Warhol's films was to reveal the essence of the sexual revolution. In the mid-1960s, Warhol switched from shooting black-and-white silent films to color films with scripts (most often of erotic content). In an effort to push the boundaries of traditional cinema, Warhol began shooting “still films.” The most significant of them were “Sleep” (1963) and “Empire” (1964). The first was a black and white 5-hour filming of a sleeping man - American poet John Giorno, not accompanied by any sounds. The film premiered on January 17, 1964 at The Film-Makers Cooperative with the participation of director Jonas Mekas, the “godfather” of the New York avant-garde cinema. A total of nine spectators were present, two of them left the screening within the first hour. Initially, Warhol replaced Giorno I wanted to film Brigitte Bardot's dream.
The plot of the second film consisted of an 8-hour show of the New York Empire State Building shot in slow motion from the evening of July 25 to the morning of July 26, 1964. With his tests and performances in cinema, Warhol wanted to open new directions in cinema and interest and surprise the jaded viewer with them.
Andy Warhol never came out, but lived the life of an openly gay man. The artist's homosexuality was actively manifested in his work. Examples include the graphic series “Sex Parts” and “Torso”, the films “Sleep”, “Blow Job”, “My Hustler” and “Lonesome Cowboys”. That is, Andy Warhol, among other things, can be counted among the pioneers and founders of queer art. The artist's boyfriends at various times were Billy Name, John Giorno, Jed Johnson and John Gould.
On June 3, 1968, radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who had previously starred in Warhol films, walked into the Factory and shot Andy three times in the stomach. Then she went outside, approached the policeman and said: “I shot Andy Warhol.” The victim suffered a state of clinical death and a 5-hour operation that ended successfully. After the assassination attempt, the artist had to wear a support corset for more than a year, since almost all of his internal organs were damaged. Warhol refused to give an incriminating statement to the police, as a result of which Solanas received only three years in prison and compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital. Themes related to violent death begin to dominate in his works. However, this topic occupied Warhol even before the assassination attempt; disasters excited him with their attractiveness. Warhol expressed his fear of death and mutilation through images of electric chairs, suicides, accidents, funerals, nuclear explosions, the mourning of Jacqueline Kennedy, posthumous portraits of Marilyn Monroe and the sick Elizabeth Taylor. One of Warhol's striking illustrations of this phobia is the 1963 painting "Tuna Disaster," which reproduces newspaper clippings and photographs of two women who were poisoned by A&P canned tuna, the can of which also appears in the image.
In 1979, he took up artistic painting of a racing car. In his opinion, a work of art moving in space is a new word, a new phenomenon in painting, the essence of beauty of which was revealed in the dynamics of movement. Warhol personally painted the car body. I applied paints with a variety of available materials, including my finger. His statement was preserved: “I tried to draw what speed looks like. When the car moves at high speed, all the lines and colors blur.”
Warhol died in his sleep from cardiac arrest at Cornwell Medical Center in Manhattan, where he underwent simple surgery to remove his gallbladder in 1987. He was buried in his native Pittsburgh. Yoko Ono attended the funeral.
It is completely impossible to understand Andy Warhal. One day he underwent a deep metamorphosis. It was in early childhood when he fell ill with scarlet fever. For a long time, young Andrew Warhola, as he was then called, suffered from several symptoms resulting from complications, and one of them was the Dance of St. Vitus. Starting from the third grade, he was constantly sick and spent most of his time in bed. Gradually, the disease receded, but its course left traits in his personality that could not disappear and manifested themselves not only in his youth, but also in his mature years. American artist Andy Warhol is a famous person to such an extent that the special character of his personality simply could not help but come into the attention of a variety of researchers. It has been examined many times from the point of view of art, and from the side of the psyche and nervous system, from the point of view of philosophy, and from the point of view of business. Therefore, in our time it is no longer possible to make any sensational statement about him. Whatever was said now, the same thing was said before. Let us only note that his non-standardity, even otherness, can serve as an example of the fact that psychopathy can be brilliantly monetized. How did he manage to do this?
Quite a professional commercial artist
Andy Warhol sometimes gives the impression of a mediocrity who, by some scandalous miracle, managed to get to the Olympus of American fame through the back door of artificially fabricated scandalousness. This is completely untrue. As a child, bedridden by illness, he cut out pictures from various magazines and made collages, which he colored. The result was a kind of children's work. The main thing in them was that the boy liked them. This tendency for the subjective to prevail over the generally accepted persisted throughout life. He likes the same things as all people, but only he managed to turn the childish ecstasy of contemplating pictures from magazines, candy wrappers and soup cans into a special kind of existential art.
He barely graduated from high school and entered the Carnegie Technical School, which at that time was not yet an institute, but was already one of the prestigious educational institutions in the United States. In 1949, the artist received a bachelor's degree and began working in his specialty. He designed shop windows, created various advertising materials and postcards, and then worked as an illustrator for popular publications such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the like. In addition, the Spanish language self-instruction manual is illustrated, which turns it into one of the most popular textbooks of that time. So Andy Warhol never suffered from a lack of professionalism. As well as the commercial demand for your talent. If Andy Warhol's work had never reached the rank of art, he would still have been one of the richest artists of his time. Suffice it to say that the design of the 1960 Coca-Cola cans is his work. So works of art were created for the soul, or better to say, due to the needs of the psyche.
Filling the lack of personal qualities as the basis of the creative process
The mystery of what Andy Warhol's paintings are is based on the type of pathology of his personality. Psychopathy is a deficiency disorder: something is always missing - feelings, empathy, self-identification, which a person strives to fill. He wrote a lot about this, because he was also drawn to writing, he even organized the magazine “Interview”, on the pages of which interviews were published that the stars took from each other.
One day he saw a girl with a pigmentation disorder. She attracted attention, he even followed her. And after just ten days, he began to have problems with pigmentation of his skin, hair, and eyes. Hence the legendary silver hair color. From a medical point of view, this is a psychosomatic disorder. He then asked, in his own words, a medical student acquaintance, if it was possible to become infected with a visual pigmentation disorder simply by looking at another patient. It is unknown what the student told him. It is possible if we are talking about a person with a special personality structure. He, like a sponge, absorbs the image, he has a huge receptacle of things in his mind, and he strives to replicate them.
The Basics of Andy Warhol's Life
Andy's biography is inextricable from three phenomena:
- pop art as an art direction;
- the concept of mass production, when paintings are made in series. The pinnacle of practical implementation was the “Factory” workshop;
- philosophy of the universal man.
Pop art, of which he is considered the founder, in Andy's understanding is an expression of momentary feelings that are evoked by everything - people, soup in cans, racing cars. To call it a glorification of packaging does not understand anything about who the artist is and what his strange painting is.
Mass production of something in art is not at all a circulation with loss of quality. Let us remember the engravings, which are also replicated. Andy just fell for the purely childish idea of silk-screen printing, which in his imagination was associated with photography. By character type, he is a cunning complex of a schizoid, a hysterical and an evasive personality. The main characteristic of a schizoid is the ability to invent the world anew every time. So he came up with a technique for himself. Not a single photographer will say that Andy Warhol took any kind of artistic photographs. He specifically chose the most popular one, intended for dummies - a Polaroid camera, in those days - the very first modifications. The photographs were transferred to a nylon mesh using contact illumination. In this way, a matrix was created, and on its basis a small edition of works of special art was produced.
Homo Universale
The philosophy of the universal man, or “homo universale,” hovered behind all this creative splendor. This is not a man, not a woman, not a thing, not a phenomenon, but always something more. In this way he reproduced his perception of the gestalt. It is characteristic that at one of the exhibitions, as an exhibit, he represented himself. And this should not be considered as eccentricity. He actually had no understanding of clear human boundaries of personality, he could treat himself as an object, even make a type of behavior out of it.
He was a homosexual who never hid it, but this does not mean that he needed sex with men. Rather, he sought to exchange energy and fully tolerated platonic affection. So, he was friends with a street artist, but it is impossible to say for sure that they were a “sweet couple.” Andy Warhol and Basquiat even organized a joint exhibition, which, although it was received with hostility by critics, meant a lot to Basquiat. But this does not mean anything, since Warhol’s true lovers are known to everyone, but it is difficult to include Basquiat in this environment. Warhol erased the boundaries of personality along with John Giorno, Billy Name, Jed Johnson, John Gould and. Although the latter is not certain, it is possible that the relationship between Keith and Andy was more platonic, although Keith himself never hid the fact that he is homosexual.
Style and works
Warhol's style of art is his own concept of pop art and arthouse. In cinema he does the same thing as in painting. He always blurs the boundaries. Everyone knows this iconic can of Campbell's soup. It's very difficult for critics to admit this, but Andy had no second meaning when he portrayed her and presented her to the audience. He sees it as a piece of the gestalt. In psychology, it is more than the sum of things. If someone looks at the kitchen table, he sees not the table, tablecloth and plates on it, but also his relationship to space and time. The table can be associated with something that is a source of comfort or discomfort. Andy doesn't play tricks with such designs, but simply draws a can of soup that he actually likes. Nobody can come up with a kitchen, they won’t have time, the psyche is blinded by the label itself, the very image of the can. This, by the way, is the main force behind the impact of commercial packaging. They work even before a person begins to think in qualitative categories.
200 one dollar bills, 1962
Banana, 1967
Campbell Soup Can, 1962
Eight Elvises, 1963
Marilyn diptych, 1962
Green Coca-Cola bottles, 1962
Red Lenin, 1987
Pistol, 1981-1982
Statue of Liberty, 1986
Che Guevara, 1968
Queen Elizabeth II, 1985
Andy Warhol loved his work, but he loved himself more. This does not mean at all that he was a complete egoist. He helped those whom he considered worthy. Why? Because versatile people are multifunctional. This is how he saw them, this is their difference from all other things. People are more things than things, because they are people. They have the right to use objects of living and inanimate nature as they please. That was his philosophy. And this is not at all a call for permissiveness. He himself did not like violence, so he considered violence unnatural for people and things. In general - the kind of guy who likes jeans, who doesn’t need to explain that doing evil is evil, because doing evil would be too difficult for him. This causes discomfort, and things and universal people should be fine. The iron logic of an autist, and it is impossible to find fault with it.
The public created a lot of noise around portraits of famous personalities, the image of Lenin on a red background, the diptych of Marilyn Monroe, containing many of her portraits and created after the death of the actress, the painting “Pistol”, the title of which is misleading because it depicts a revolver. We can say with confidence that Andy simply did not cut off such subtleties. For him, it was much more important that the painting depicted a copy of the weapon used by one Valerie Solanas, a writer, screenwriter and radical feminist, widely known in a very narrow circle before the assassination attempt and who became a celebrity after it. This happened at the "Factory", which was an art workshop, a club, a film studio and sometimes a nativity scene. The result of the assassination attempt was that he experienced great physical and moral suffering. Three bullets hit him in the stomach, and someone else from those who constantly hung around the “Factory” on business and idle was wounded. However, Andy did not sue Valerie. She was sentenced to three years and forced treatment in a psychiatric clinic.
Due to the assassination attempt, his health was seriously compromised, but there was no direct connection between it and death. The shots were fired in 1968, and death occurred in 1987, 19 years later. During these years, the artist continued to be creative, in particular, he experimented with the coloring of a racing car, which was a dynamic work of art.
Andy Warhol died of cardiac arrest while at Cornwell Medical Center in Manhattan, where he underwent surgery to remove his gallbladder. In the last years before his death, he was the best-selling and most expensive artist in the United States.