Andy Warhol Biography and Artwork

born Pittsburgh, PA (USA) 1928 died New York, NY (USA) 1987

"I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked."

He was one of the most enigmatic figures in American art. His work became the definitive expression of a culture obsessed with images. He was surrounded by a coterie of beautiful bohemians with names like Viva, Candy Darling, and Ultra Violet. He held endless drug– and sex–filled parties, through which he never stopped working. He single–handedly confounded the distinctions between high and low art. His films are pivotal in the formation of contemporary experimental art and pornography. He spent the final years of his life walking around the posh neighborhoods of New York with a plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills, buying jewelry and knick knacks. His name was Andy Warhol, and he changed the nature of art forever.

He was born to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents in Forest City, Pennsylvania. He was a shy quiet boy, leaving high school to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He received his bachelors of fine arts degree from there in 1949, and headed immediately to New York. In New York, Warhol found design jobs in advertising. Before long he had begun specializing in illustrations of shoes. His work appeared in GLAMOUR, VOGUE, and HARPER'S BAZAAR. In the mid–'50s he became the chief illustrator for I. Miller Shoes, and in 1957 a shoe advertisement won him the Art Director's Club Medal.

During this time, Warhol had also been working on a series of pictures separate from the advertisements and illustrations. It was this work that he considered his serious artistic endeavor. Though the paintings retained much of the style of popular advertising, their motivation was just the opposite. The most famous of the paintings of this time are the thirty–two paintings of Campbell soup cans. With these paintings, and other work that reproduced Coca–Cola bottles, Superman comics, and other immediately recognizable popular images, Warhol was mirroring society's obsessions. Where the main concern of advertising was to slip into the unconscious and unrecognizably evoke a feeling of desire, Warhol's work was meant to make the viewer actually stop and look at the images that had become invisible in their familiarity. These ideas were similarly being dealt with by artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg – and came to be known as Pop Art.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Warhol produced work at an amazing rate. He embraced a mode of production similar to that taken on by the industries he was mimicking, and referred to his studio as "The Factory." The Factory was not only a production center for Warhol's paintings, silk–screens, and sculptures, but also a central point for the fast–paced high life of New York in the '60s. Warhol's obsession with fame, youth, and personality drew the most wild and interesting people to The Factory throughout the years. Among the regulars were Mick Jagger, Martha Graham, Lou Reed, and Truman Capote. For many, Warhol was a work of art in himself, reflecting back the basic desires of an consumerist American culture. He saw fame as the pinnacle of modern consumerism and reveled in it the way artists a hundred years before reveled in the western landscape. His oft–repeated statement that "every person will be world–famous for fifteen minutes" was an incredible insight into the growing commodification of everyday life.

By the mid–'60s Warhol had become one of the most famous artists in the world. He continued, however, to baffle the critics with his aggressively groundbreaking work. Putting aside much of the "pop" imagery, he concentrated on making films. His films, as his paintings had been, were primarily concerned with getting the viewer to look at something for longer than they otherwise would. Using film, Warhol could control the viewer's attention. One of his most famous films, SLEEP (1963), was eight hours of the poet John Giorno asleep in his bed. Warhol's movement into film directing and production brought him into contact with dozens of artists and actors interested in working in The Factory. One of these was actress and writer Valerie Solanas, who had for some time been trying to get Warhol to produce one of her scripts. In 1968, in anger at Warhol's disinterest, Solanas (the founder and only member of S.C.U.M., the Society for Cutting Up Men), shot and nearly killed Warhol.

During Warhol's extended convalescence he began to work on a new mode of art. Considered his "Post–Pop" period, the images were primarily portraits of living superstars. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Warhol produced hundreds of portraits, mostly in silk screen. His images of Liza Minnelli, Jimmy Carter, Albert Einstein, Elizabeth Taylor, and Philip Johnson express a more subtle and expressionistic side of his work. During the final years of his life, Warhol became the hero of another generation of artists, including Keith Haring, Jean–Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente. Their work represents a continuation of an artistic revolution begun by Andy Warhol. On February 22, 1987, Warhol died. Many suggested it was a poorly performed minor surgery he had had earlier that day, while others believed it was due to the general weakening of his body after the shooting. What remains certain is that during the sixty years of whirlwind and mystery that was Andy Warhol's life, the art world (and the world at large) became a more fun and interesting place.

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Filmography

• Blow Job (1963)
• Eat (1963)
• Haircut (1963)
• Kiss (1963)
• Naomi's Birthday Party (1963)
• Sleep (1963)
• 13 Most Beautiful Women (1964)
• Batman Dracula (1964)
• Clockwork (1964)
• Couch (1964)
• Drunk (1964)
• Empire (1964)
• The End of Dawn (1964)
• Lips (1964)
• Mario Banana I (1964)
• Mario Banana II (1964)
• Messy Lives (1964)
• Naomi and Rufus Kiss (1964)
• Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of (1964)
• The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964)
• Beauty #2 (1965)
• Bitch (1965)
• Camp (1965)
• Harlot (1965)
• Horse (1965)
• Kitchen (1965)
• The Life of Juanita Castro (1965)
• My Hustler (1965)
• Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)
• Restaurant (1965)
• Space (1965)
• Taylor Mead's Ass (1965)
• Vinyl (1965)
• Screen Test (1965)
• Screen Test #2 (1965)
• Ari and Mario (1966)
• Hedy (film) (1966)
• Kiss the Boot (1966)
• Milk (1966)
• Salvador Dali (1966)
• Shower (1966)
• Sunset (1966)
• Superboy (1966)
• The Closet (1966)
• Chelsea Girls (1966)
• The Beard (film) (1966)
• More Milk, Yvette (1966)
• Outer and Inner Space (1966)
• The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966)
• The Andy Warhol Story (1967)
• Tiger Morse (1967)
• **** (1967)
• The Imitation of Christ (1967)
• The Nude Restaurant (1967)
• Bike Boy (1967)
• I, a Man (1967)
• San Diego Surf (1968)
• The Loves of Ondine (1968)
• Blue Movie (1969)
• Lonesome Cowboys (1969)
• L'Amour (1972)
• Flesh (film) (1968)
• Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (USA)
• Blood for Dracula (1974) aka Andy Warhol's Dracula (USA)

Other Mediums

• Drawing: Warhol started his career drawing commercial illustrations in "blotted–ink" style for warehouses and magazines. Most well known are his pictures of shoes. Some of his drawings were published in little booklets, like "Yum, Yum, Yum" (about food), "Ho, Ho, Ho" (about Christmas) and (of course) "Shoes, Shoes, Shoes." His most artistically acclaimed book of drawings is probably "The Gold Book," compiled of sensitive, personal drawings of young men. "The Gold Book" is thus dubbed because of the gold leaf that decorates the pages.
• Sculpture: Warhol's most famous sculpture is probably his "Brillo Boxes," silkscreened wooden replicas of Brillo soap boxes. Other famous works include the "Silver Floating Pillows"; gas–filled, silver, pillow–shaped balloons that were floated out of the window during the presentation. A "Silver Floating Pillow" was included in the traveling exhibition "Air Art" (1968–1969) curated by Willoughby Sharp.
• Audio: At one point Warhol carried a portable recorder with him wherever he went, taping everything everybody said and did. He referred to this device as his "wife." Some of these tapes were the basis for his literary work. Another audio–work of Warhol's was his "Invisible Sculpture," a presentation in which burglar alarms would go off when entering the room. Warhol's cooperation with the musicians of The Velvet Underground was driven by an expressed desire to become a music producer.
• Time capsules: Throughout his life, Warhol saved many of his correspondences, articles about himself and those which fascinated him, and numerous other items (everything from food to gay porn). Several of these items were boxed up and, progressively, numbered. They eventually totaled in the dozens. Today the Warhol Museum houses them and is in the process of opening and sorting them. As of 2007 there remain boxes which, while cataloged, have not been re–opened since their original sealing. (see external links below for more info).
• Television: Andy Warhol dreamed of a television show that he wanted to call "The Nothing Special," a special about his favorite subject: Nothing. Later in his career he did create two cable television shows, "Andy Warhol's TV" in 1982 and "Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes" for MTV in 1986. Besides his own shows he regularly made guest appearances in shows, including a notable appearance on "The Love Boat" wherein a Midwestern wife (Marion Ross) fears Andy Warhol will reveal to her husband (Tom Bosley) her secret past as a Warhol superstar named Marina del Rey.
• Fashion: Warhol is quoted for having said: "I'd rather buy a dress and put it up on the wall, than put a painting, wouldn't you?" One of his most well–known Superstars, Edie Sedgwick, aspired to be a fashion designer, and his good friend Halston was a famous one. Warhol's work in fashion includes silkscreened dresses, a short sub–career as a catwalk–model and books on fashion as well as paintings with fashion (shoes) as a subject.
• Performance Art: Warhol and his friends staged happenings; theatrical multimedia presentations during parties, containing music, film, slide projections and Gerard Malanga in an S&M outfit cracking a whip. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable is the culmination of this area of his work.
• Photography: To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. Warhol was an accomplished photographer, and took an enormous amount of photographs of Factory visitors, friends – given the importance of this medium to both his paintings and to film, one might say that an interest in photography lies at the center of his artistic practice.
• Computer: Warhol used Amiga computers to generate digital art.

Quotes

• "I believe in low lights and trick mirrors."
• "Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job."
• "I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screening,so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else."
• "An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them."
• "Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery."
• "Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."
• "During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered."
• "Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details."
• "Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax–deductible."
• "I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with."
• "I am a deeply superficial person."
• "I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs."
• "I keep reading about this, erm, Indian guy that turns out like three or four thousand pictures a minute...or maybe it's a day."
• "I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows."
• "I like boring things."
• "I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."
• "I met someone on the street who said wasn't it great that we're going to have a movie star for president, that it was so Pop, and (laughs) when you think about it like that, it is great, it's so American."
• "I never think that people die. They just go to department stores."
• "I never read. I just look at pictures."
• "I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say "figment"."
• "I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own."
• "I went to China, I didn't want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great."
• "I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, "Well, what do you love most?" That's how I started painting money."
• "I'll endorse with my name any of the following; clothing AC–DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N' ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!!"
• "I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning."
• "I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom."
• "I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks."
• "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
• "Isn't life just a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?"
• "It doesn't matter if it displays Mona Lisa, a Banana or Hans Rittman's glasses – the fact is it must be pop!"
• "It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."
• "People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don't look."
• "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
• "My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person."
• "People are only glamorous if you don't see them. Like the movies used to make people years ago. There is something about people on screen that makes them so special; when you see them in person, they are so different and the whole illusion is gone."
• "The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful things in Stockholm is McDonald's. Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet."
• "The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet."
• "They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."
• "When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships."
• "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca–Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.."

Publications

• Gold Book
• Wild Raspberries
• Holy Cats
• A, a novel (1968, ISBN 0–8021–3553–6) is a literal transcription – containing spelling errors and phonetically written background noise and mumbling – of audio recordings of Ondine and several of Andy Warhol's friends hanging out at the Factory, talking, going out.
• The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; from A to B and back again (1975, ISBN 0–15–671720–4) – according to Pat Hackett's introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, Pat Hackett did the transcriptions and text for the book based on daily phone conversations, sometimes (when Warhol was traveling) using audio cassettes that Andy Warhol gave her. Said cassettes contained conversations with Brigid Berlin (also known as Brigid Polk) and former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello.
• Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980, ISBN 0–15–672960–1), authored by Warhol and Pat Hackett is a retrospective view of the sixties and the role of Pop Art.
• The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989, ISBN 0–446–39138–7, edited by Pat Hackett) is an edited diary that was dictated by Warhol to Hackett in daily phone conversations. Warhol started keeping a diary to keep track of his expenses after being audited, although it soon evolved to include his personal and cultural observations.

Quick Facts

• Andy Warhol was an American artist associated with the definition of Pop Art.
• He was a painter, an avant–garde filmmaker, a commercial illustrator, music industry producer, writer and celebrity. He founded the magazine Interview.
• Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US.
• Warhol showed an early artistic talent and studied commercial art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (Carnegie Tech, at the time).
• During the 1960s, Warhol transformed himself from an advertising illustrator into one of the most famous American artists of the day. In many ways, Andy Warhol and his circle helped define the decade.
• He painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings – many of the latter were iconic images from headline stories of the decade (e.g. photographs of mushroom clouds, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters). His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal – this aspect interested him most, and it unifies his paintings from this period.
• As an advertisement illustrator in the 1950s Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity.
• On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas turned up at Warhol's studio and shot the artist, as well as Mario Amaya.
• Warhol was seriously wounded by the attack and barely survived (doctors cut open his chest and massaged his heart to help stimulate its movement again). He suffered physical effects for the rest of his life (he had to wear a corset, for example, to support his abdomen).
• Warhol used to socialize at Serendipity 3 and, later in the 70s, Studio 54, nightspots in New York City. He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and as a meticulous observer. Art critic Robert Hughes called him "the white mole of Union Square".
• Warhol was one of the first major homosexual American artists to be open about his sexuality.
• Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes.
• At the relatively young age of 58, Warhol died in New York City at 6:32 a.m. on February 22, 1987. According to news reports, he had been making good recovery from a routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital before dying in his sleep from a sudden heart attack.

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