For Warhol, not quite 34 years old, it was his first solo painting exhibit. His secret weapon? Artist Andy Warhol with one of his later Campbell's-themed projects. Pop turned traditional art upside down. They used humor and irony to comment on how mass production and consumerism had come to dominate so much of American life and culture.
Abstract artists of the s like Jackson Pollock may have glorified themselves as creative, individualist geniuses, but Pop artists of the s took the opposite approach. They tried to smooth over or eliminate all traces of their own art-making processes—like brush strokes—so that their work seemed almost mechanical, like the mass-produced subject matter it portrayed.
In using fine art techniques to depict an everyday manufactured object, Warhol captured an essential contradiction in Pop art. It Killed Him 19 Years Later. However, there are some other similarities here.
As in Barnett Newman's popular Stations of the Cross series of works, Coca-Cola is comprised of a large, black mass on a white background. The bottle jumps out at the viewer; demanding the kind of attention Motherwell's profound canvases received - yet now the sense of irony reigns. After her sudden death from an overdose of sleeping pills in August , superstar Marilyn Monroe's life, career, and tragedy became a worldwide obsession.
Warhol, being infatuated with fame and pop culture, obtained a black-and-white publicity photo of her from her film Niagara and used the photo to create several series of images. A common idea to all the Marilyn works was that her image was reproduced over and over again as one would find it reprinted in newspapers and magazines at the time.
After viewing dozens, or hundreds of such images, a viewer stops seeing a person depicted, but is left with an icon of popular, consumer culture. The image and the person become another cereal box on the supermarket shelf, one of hundreds of boxes - which are all exactly the same. In Gold Marilyn Monroe , Warhol further plays on the idea iconography, placing Marilyn's face on a very large golden-colored background.
The background is reminiscent of Byzantine religious icons that are the central focus in Orthodox faiths to this day. Only instead of a god, we are looking at an image that becomes a bit garish upon closer inspection of a woman that rose to fame and died in horrible tragedy.
Warhol subtly comments on our society, and its glorification of celebrities to the level of the divine. Here again the Pop artist uses common objects and images to make very pointed insights into the values and surroundings of his contemporaries. In the early 60s, during a period of immense creativity, Warhol continued to challenge the status quo through a different medium, film.
Over his career Warhol made over films spanning a wide range of subjects. His films were lauded by the art world, and their influence is seen in performance art and expiremental filmmaking to this day. In the actress Tilda Swinton participated in an installation where she slept in a glass box at MoMA and the writer, actress, and director Lena Dunham recently expressed her desire to remake Warhol's Sleep shot for shot, but with herself as the subject.
Sleep is one of the artist's earliest films and his first foray into durational film, a style that became one of his signatures. This six-hour movie is a detailed exploration of John Giorno sleeping.
Warhol's lover at the time, the viewer sees Giorno through Warhol's eyes, a strip of Giorno's naked body is in every scene. Although this seems to be a series of continuous images, it is actually six one hundred foot rolls of film layered and spliced together, played on repeat. Repetition was at the heart of Warhol's oeuvre , as well as his fascination with the mundane. All people need to sleep; Warhol once again transformed banality into artistic expression.
Empire and Eat succeeded Sleep in the canon of Warhol's duration films. Empire chronicles eight hours of the Empire State Building at dusk and Eat is a 45 minute film about a man eating a mushroom. Warhol's themes were as expansive as his filmography, delving into more explicit areas such as homosexuality and gay culture, such as Blowjob , a continuous shot of DeVeren Bookwalter's face while he receives oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, and Lonesome Cowboys , a raunchy western.
His films are widely recognized as Pop masterpieces, enshrined in film institutes and modern art archives across the world. Orange Car Crash is from the Death and Disaster series that consumed much of Warhol's attention in this period. Often using gruesome and graphic images taken from daily newspapers, he would use the photo-silkscreening method to repeat them across the canvas.
The repetition of the image, and its fragmentation and degradation, are important in creating the impact of the pictures, but also in sterilizing the image. To see the graphic photo once leaves the viewer distraught and shaken - but to see that photo reproduced over and over again as seen every day in the press undermines the image's power as the scene of horror becomes another mass-market image.
There is an alternative way to view this and other works from Warhol's Death and Disaster series proposed by the Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight. The car crash shown is very similar to the photo of the Long Island car crash where Jackson Pollock died in Warhol is reminding the viewers that Abstract Expressionism championed by Pollock is now dead. So maybe Warhol is not so much involved in popular art, but rather providing very specific and elite art world commentary.
Similarly, Warhol's Electric Chair series has a "Silence" sign at the back of the depicted electrocution room, which Warhol connects to John Cage's modernist work with sound and Cage's book of essays. Still using the silkscreen technique, this time on plywood, Warhol presented the viewer with exact replicas of commonly used products found in homes and supermarkets. This time, his art pieces are stackable, they are sculptures that can be arranged in various ways in the gallery - yet each box is exactly the same, one is no better than another.
Rather than the series of slightly different paintings that have been made by many famous artists think Monet's haystacks or cathedrals Warhol makes the point that these products are all the same and in his opinion they are beautiful!
Making these items in his "factory" Warhol again makes fun of or brilliantly provokes the art world and the artist-creator. With Brillo Boxes , Warhol also has a personal connection. Warhol was originally from Pittsburg - steel city, the commodity that made the city prosperous and later quite depressed. Brillo is steel wool, a product stereotypically used by housewives to keep cookware shining in their lovely American homes. Did Warhol like the product itself, think the store displays for the product ridiculous, or as a gay man, did he enjoy the contrast of steel and wool, in one friendly package?
He was also happy to buy or take ideas from other people. How could you change its original content to make it into a work of art? Think about the colours you could use; expressive techniques to make it look less mass produced; or what about changing the title or wording?
You could do this in a humorous way or to make a statement that questions big brand commerce. In , Geldzahler had said to Warhol:. High profile events like the death of Marilyn Monroe and the assassination of John F. Kennedy were as interesting to Warhol as car crashes, suicides, riots and legal executions. His images of human or animal skulls present death as a universal subject.
At the same time he explored his own mortality through photographs, prints and paintings in which he coupled his own image with an emblem of death. In Skulls Warhol repeats the same image six times using a photograph he bought in a Paris flea market. Warhol juxtaposes bright, candy colours with the deep, black eye sockets of the skull, reminding us that death is a part of even the most colourful of lives.
This made him even more fascinated by death. The weapon depicted in Gun is similar to the. By using the gun in his art, Warhol draws attention to an object that has become an American cultural icon. He depicts it in the same cold, impersonal way, as he represented consumer goods in his earlier artworks, suggesting the emptiness of modern life as represented by its objects.
Think about how you could recreate it in a new way either to change or to add to its original meaning. Try taking a dramatically lit photograph of it, or drawing or painting it with bright acid colours.
In his photographs, prints and paintings he could freeze a moment in time and repeat it over and over again, while in his films he documented and slowed time down. In Warhol preserved time in his series of autobiographical Time Capsules. He filled boxes filled with things collected from his daily life, such as magazines, books, taxi receipts, photographs and business files. He sealed these and put them in storage. They are now held at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Paintings are too hard.
The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. Andy Warhol, Time magazine, Warhol produced nearly films between and His films were experimental and were driven by his desire to capture the ordinary experience of living.
His films are now recognised as radical explorations that went beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema. In Warhol famously withdrew all his films from circulation. This meant that critics and scholars had to write about them from memory, from reviews or from verbal descriptions.
He made the poster The Films of Andy Warhol in for the exhibition that opened at the Museum of Modern Art showcasing his extensive film work. As well as making films Warhol was a keen photographer. In , after being given a camera, he began to document seemingly insignificant aspects of his life.
These range from photographs of himself or his friends, to everyday abstractions like footprints in sand and graffiti on the streets. In he developed a series of images that became known as his stitched photographs. These were created by sewing several identical images together as in Self Portrait — The threads used to join the photographs are left hanging, giving them a rough-and-ready quality. Like his early screen prints they are arranged in a repetitive grid formation.
Warhol spent much of his time documenting his life through self portrait photographs and films of his friends. He saw these photographs and films as artworks.
Think of the ways in which you could digitally document an aspect of your own life as a work of art, to preserve an important moment in time. You could also create a longer document to suggest the passing of time like a video diry or a series of photographs documenting a journey or activity you are involved in. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Mikova , in what is now Slovakia.
Thanks to the postal bonds set aside for him by his father who died when Andrew was 13 , Warhol was the first person in his family to attend college. At Carnegie Tech, he was a moonbeam: pale, fanciful, elfish, and already remote.
And talented. Miller company to produce images for its weekly footwear ads in The New York Times. He did illustrations for the slickest magazines and piecework for the biggest corporate accounts, made Christmas cards for Tiffany and perfume ads for Bonwit Teller. He borrowed a technique from the Lithuanian-born American painter Ben Shahn of tracing a sketch in ink, then pressing the wet ink against a piece of absorbent blotting paper to transfer the image.
He bought a four-story townhouse on Lexington Avenue, off 89th Street. But he wanted to be a fine artist, and in the s, Warhol still associated being a fine artist with being an expressive one; and to work expressively was to all but admit he was gay. The epochal turning point came in , when Warhol showed a handful of acquaintances and art-world players two paintings of a Coke bottle.
One was a lyrical meditation in an abstract-expressionist mode, complete with Jackson Pollock—style drippings. The other was as clean and cold and devoid of personal expression as the item itself.
Then a friend suggested that he paint an everyday object, such as a can of soup. The results were infinitely repeatable, and when the screen clotted with paint, imperfect duplication made for variations. She argues that Warhol, in making his hand disappear, was not responding to the postmodern condition so much as solving a strategic challenge brought on by the closet.
Up to , when a show at the Stable Gallery made Warhol famous, his is a Cinderella story I say this without irony and quite moving.
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