Category: Andy Warhol

Introduction

Typically, painted images are full of clues regarding the historical and cultural context. They also carry the message regarding the interest and abilities of the artist. In fact, they always depict the person in the image. Visual analysis of works of art involves keen observation of the details painted by an artist from formal and narrative contents of the work.

Visual analysis involves interpretation, description and evaluation of the portrait by focusing the attention to yield significant information regarding the work of art. The information obtained is important in making comparisons between different portraits. This study explores formal and narrative content of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait 1660, Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Joseph Roulin 1889 and Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe 1962.

Thesis Statement

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait 1660, Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Joseph Roulin 1889 and Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe 1962 differ in entirety regarding the messages sent by pose and facial expressions and the utilization of the painting frame.

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait 1660

The portrait was created in 1660. Rembrandt used oil on canvas nine years prior to his demise. The portrait features no other individual. This is significant given that it implies the depth of privacy the artist valued. However, considering the direction of the eyesight, he seems to be looking at another person albeit missing from the frame.

He appears to be looking at somebody else as a patient. His face is red-dotted with signs of rosacea. Besides, the dots may be a stylistic devise commonly used by the artist in his previous works of art. In the portrait, the artist’s eyes appear normal. The left eye is to some extent narrower than the right eye.

The eyes do not indicate any signs of palpebral ptosis or a pterygium. The bright line seems to suggest he was ailing from arcus senilis. The latter eye depicts healthy individuals happy with the inner self and heath. The faces of the Monroe and Roulin radiate contentment with their lives. Closer observation of the face reveals that the lit line is a mirror image of the cornea.

Most of his other paintings also contain the reflection of the cornea. In paintings such as Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Joseph Roulin 1889, this effect is not evident, as Roulin’s eyes appear dull. In fact, they do not reflect any light although there is abundant light that may have reflected considering that his eyes are wide open. In the Gold Marilyn Monroe 1962 portrait, Monroe’s eyes are also open and white around the iris.

However, the sufficient light that illuminate the image do not reflect. Her eyes seem to absorb every ray of light. While Rembrandt’s eyes seem to suggest his inner soul, the latter images appear to consume the light.

Figure 1: Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait 1660 .

The image depicts sign of aging of Rembrandt. The skin is lightly colored compared to other self-portraits painted previously. The skin illustrates signs of senile degeneration. The dullness of his clothing merges with the background.

In contrast to portraits of Roulin and Monroe, the background seems to swallow the artist while the latter appears to dominate the frame directing the attention of the audience details of the figures as opposed to outrightly focusing on the face.

Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Joseph Roulin 1889

The portrait depicts Roulin clad in a blue uniform he constantly wore pompously as a postal employee in Arles Southern France. The artist wrote to his brother Theo of his thrill regarding “the contemporary portrait”. This picture rendered quality not by the simulation of the sitter’s look, but through the autonomous and bright verve of color. His subject in this image is Joseph Roulin. The portrayal was drawn when Roulin got a better job.

Figure 2: Portrait of Joseph Roulin 1889 .

Dressed in a blue uniform, the image is set on a background with creative surroundings of whirling flowers. Gogh typically did not paint people, but concentrated on natural elements such as landscapes, sunflowers and wheat fields. Rembrandt painted many individuals that he felt were worth remembering. Apart from his self-portrait, Gogh painted Roulin given that he was his close friend (Gutierrez 1).

The frame reflects a dark, yet peaceful mood. However, Rembrandt’s frame is full of dullness and gloomy mood. The peaceful mood of this frame is indicative of satisfaction within Gogh given that he had found greener pastures. The darkness of the frame is indicative of the sadness Gogh felt in his soul due to the departure of Roulin from Arles for a better-paying job. The color of the eyes is dull.

It implies that Roulin was also sad to leave his friend behind when he left. However, the pose indicates that Roulin was proud of his new status. The cap is positioned squarely on his head like a disciplined forces personnel with the label ‘posts’ clearly visible. This indicates that Roulin was proud of his work.

Discipline forces personnel typically shave the beards. In the image, Roulin has long beards. This is illustrative of the freedom from any authority to do as he wishes. He is under no obligation to look in accordance to anyone’s wishes. Gogh believed in using colors to express his feelings. In this portrait, the background is multicolored with green dominating.

The color is a representation of spiritualism of the artist who believes in the eternity of humanity. In fact, it is the illustration of the platonic belief in an ideal world. The eternal world lies ahead of his friend even as he moves away from Arles. Unlike in other portraits that lack flowers, the flowers used in this portrait are representations of life. The curls of the flowers seem to suggest that life is not always smooth given that there are multiple challenges which humanity has to contend with throughout.

Roulin’s beard is curled while Monroe only the hairs are curled. Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait shows no such curls. The flow of the curves in Roulin portrait mimics the background swirls of the flowers. This is an indication that the artist believes that Roulin possess eternal life just as flowers. In addition, the curls guide the eyes of the audience through the painting in a harmonious way.

The viewer can easily pick details without the eyes dilating and contracting frequently. The frame does not have any shadow of the image yet the frame appears to illuminate since fine details are observable. This means that the figure is lit from all directions. Gogh believed that Roulin was righteous. Hence, the light came from all directions. He had no soul blemishes.

Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe 1962

Warhol as an artist was unique regarding the techniques he applied to produce his work of art. His techniques had not been observed previously in the world of art. Rembrandt and Gogh applied techniques that had been used previously. The rich mix of colors is not apparent in the latter artists’ work. Typically, the artist would combine drawings with photography.

In Monroe’s frame, the face is centralized and small with the background occupying most of the frame. The latter’s frames are significantly occupied by the images. He would paint silk-screened canvases with pictures using abstract colors. Regularly, he utilized his own photos.

However, he occasionally used pictures of other artists whenever he desired to depict a matter that he would never have a chance to take a snap. Gold Marilyn Monroe 1962 is one such portrait. Indeed, it depicts the face of a young woman. The portrait is silk screened onto a canvas.

Figure 3: Gold Marilyn Monroe 1962 portrait

Visually, very modest of her dressing can be seen on the image. This is founded on the tight cropping of the painting. Besides, the image appears to be wearing a dress that is tied at the back of the neck. This is illustrative of the changing trends in the dressing code. Similar to Roulin portrait showing the newly acquired status, the Monroe image gives the impression that women had undergone significant stages in acquiring freedom not only in dressing, but also in the liberation from male dominance.

Monroe hair has been trimmed short. However, it appears to fall very near the head, but underneath the ears. The impression implies that despite the fact that women are gradually gaining liberation from male dominance, men still have relative authority above women.

The falling of the hair indicates that women still stoop to men irrespective of the freedom they have acquired as gender factors in order to make the distinction between men and women apparent. In the Roulin’s case, the beard is indicative of authority of the male gender. The beard is more of a ‘mane’ than a beard and seeks to demonstrate masculinity.

The background of the frame is golden. This is a reference to the Byzantine Icons. In fact, it seeks to illustrate that Warhol was very conversant with the icons considering the Christian and religious upbringing in his childhood. This was noth the case in Rembrandt and Roulin’s Portraits. By incorporating gold in the image, the artist sought to indicate that the familiarity he had with Christianity was similar to the familiarity Monroe had with iconography in pop spheres.

Typically, Byzantine spiritual paintings are meant to facilitate praying. The perception created by this element eliminates the necessity of the background from that of Christianity and naturalistic that renders to the adoration of human. Warhol transfigures Monroe into a religious symbol founded on byzantine through the appropriation of techniques similar to those used in the Christian and religious context.

The artists painted a small image at the center of a huge frame on the golden canvas background. It is hardly proportional to the entire size of the composition. This eliminates the setting and loss of a sense of time from the composition. When ballooned, the image is distorted and un-naturalistic unlike in other portraits.

Considering that, the portrait was painted immediately after Monroe committed suicide, the artist sought to capture the attention of the audience to contemplate about the glamour. The portrait is multi colored. The artist aimed to capture the attention of the audience to the bizarreness of Monroe’s identity. Monroe seemed to live a dual lifestyle where she fitted in the traditional society as well as the emerging pop society.

The gold background may imply the traditional society to which Monroe managed to disengage herself from in totality. However, the society considered her part of it not only as a member but also as an icon that they could look upon always. The many colors on the image of Monroe indicates the uniqueness of her multiple personalities that she had during her lifetime.

Conversely, the other two portraits denote the specific person’s states of affairs. Roulin is contented since he has been offered a better-paying job while Rembrandt is going through some form of illness. The icon would fit in any societal setting irrespective of culture. Her personality attracted people of all races, gender and age.

By using commercial technique of silk-screening, Warhol gives the image a crisp and synthetic look despite his canonization of Monroe. This reveals Monroe’s public figure as a cautiously planned illusion of who she really was. Her position as a pop icon was not her natural individual. In fact, it was a creation of the changing times and flexibility to fit in a changed society.

Her teeth are white as they are in real life indicating that despite the transformation she had undergone to fit in the changing pop society, she still had elements of traditional culture embedded in her because of her upbringing. The latter portraits are concerned neither with the societal affairs nor with the individuals’ pasts.

Conclusion

The three works of art are similar in the sense that they all feature facial expressions of people. They communicate their moods and the experiences they are undergoing at the time of painting except for Gold Marilyn Monroe whose image and the coloring denote life experiences of the past.

The portraits have more differences than similarities regarding the theme they seek to express. Monroe portrait’s theme is about the society; Gogh’s is about the inner soul and state of health while Roulin is about happiness with achievements.

Works Cited

Gutierrez, Antonio 2012. Portrait of Joseph Roulin by Vincent van Gogh 1889. May 2012. Web.

Osaka, David 2013. Rembrandt. February 2013. Web.

Introduction

Andy Warhol is one of the most admired and widely discussed artists that worked in the genre of pop art. Warhol is often called a controversial artist, he once emphasized that the viewers never need to look deeper than the surface evaluating his art works. The artist meant that his works speak for themselves and their symbolism is right on the surface, so one must not look for hidden meanings or “read between the lines”.

Andy Warhol’s Pop Art

Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” is an artwork that consists of thirty two separate pieces. Each piece has just one image, which is a close up picture of a Campbell soup can, each of the pieces depicts different soup, which is marked in the labels on the cans. The work first appeared in 1962, at that time Campbell Soup Company had thirty two product flavors in total. Warhol turned each of them into a pop art work.

When this work was exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles, all the thirty two pictures were set in a row on the shelves as if they were actual goods in a grocery store (Campbell’s Soup Cans par 2). Currently all of the pieces of the work are kept at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They are currently arranged chronologically according to the release dates of each of the soup flavors presented by the artist.

This art work represents the classics of the genre of pop art. First of all it is a mechanical repetitive pattern. Secondly, for this work Andy Warhol took a brand name and a label and presented it as an art piece. Finally, the artist created a modular series created by means of silk screening, which adds to the technical side to the art work making it even more modern (Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans par. 4).

Taking a mundane object and turning it into an art work, Warhol suggested looking differently at this object, seeing more than just an advertisement in this repetitive pattern (Why is this art? Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans par. 1).Warhol pointed out that mass production and consumption are significant parts of the modern culture (Pop Art- the art of popular culture par. 1).

Pop art as a genre occurred in the United States and Britain in 1950s and 1960s. The art was a revolt against the classical standards in art, the orthodoxies. For the first time art was focused on objects of popular culture such as movies, celebrities, comics and goods (Pop art par. 3). It was meant to combine the most unexpected items and present them as pieces of art. The critics of that time and today agree that using what was called a low subject matter was the point of pop art.

Creating a combination of the most unexpected items was the main point of pop art. Combining fiction with visual art and with poetry seems rather unconventional, which makes it potentially suitable subject for pop art. Putting verbal art into a picture is not an orthodoxy practice, yet it was not a frequently used combination in pop art. A poem could help explain the meaning of the image or it could be completely logically unrelated to the visual part of the art work.

One of the main focuses of pop art genre was to present the audience with a lot of unspoken concepts, presenting silent objects arranged in a certain pattern or just scattered in the canvas. The only words present in pop art works are the labels as in Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” or short interjections such as “Wham!” or “Wroom!” that can be found in the pages comic books. Specific poetry has not been a part of pop art, probably, due to its explanatory function which was widely rejected in pop art.

Conclusion

Poetry as a part of art works would be likely to turn pop art into postmodernism and add depth to the subject matter of the art work which was uncommon in pop art. This genre stands for the simplicity, repetition, mass production and mass culture. Poetry has never been mass culture, so adding it to pop art would go against the main concept of the genre.

Traditional pop art scene is not supposed to include explanations, addresses, messages, and poem is all of these things. Besides, poetry clashes with the typical items and focuses of pop art which are supposed to be plain and simple such as vacuum cleaners, celebrity posters or soup cans.

Since poetry is not a product of mass consumption, it was not included into pop art pieces. Even though it would create an even bigger difference between the orthodoxies of art and pop art, it went against the themes explored in pop art. The pictures of this genre were not supposed to talk to their audience, just like goods on the supermarket shelves do not talk to the consumers. A combination of poetry and visual images is certainly a kind of art but it is not pop art.

Works Cited

Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. MoMa. 2014. Web.

Campbell’s Soup Cans. MoMA Learning. Web.

Pop art. Tate. Web.

Pop Art– the art of popular culture. ArtyFactory. 2014. Web.

Why is this art? Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans. Khan Academy. 2014. Web.

Andy Warhol is a well known American artist and filmmaker, born in Pittsburgh as Andrew Warhola. He was the leading exponent of the pop art movement and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century. The youngest of three sons, Andrew studied at the prestigious Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1945 along with Balcomb Greene, Robert Lepper, Samuel Rosenberg, and others (Wrbican 1).

He experimented with his name and dropped the final ‘a’ from ‘Warhola’ his family name. He graduated in June 1949 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design. Andy Warhola began his career in 1949 as a commercial artist in New York City. He was commissioned to create a series of show illustrations for Glamour, a fashion magazine. He soon became widely popular as Andy Warhol and his works appeared in many magazines such as Glamour, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. He launched his first art exhibition in 1952 at the Huge Gallery titled “Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Copote” (AWM 1).

Warhol achieved great success as a commercial artist in the 1950s. The heady mixture of bohemian culture spread across the US in the 1960s. His mass produced and recurring visual images are now recognized as symbols of the 1960s gay culture: ‘the silk-screens of Elvis and Troy Donahue (1962-1964); the New York World’s Fair mural of “Thirteen Most Wanted Men” (1964); the films Sleep (1963), Blow-job (1963), My Hustler (1965), Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Flesh (1968). Thesis: The bohemian philosophy of anarchy and individualism was reflected in the figure of Andy Warhol, the most prominent figure of the New York Pop Art scene.

During the early 1950s Warhol came into contact with other cultures and this exposure impacted his later artwork. In the mid-1950s, he was part of a theatre crowd that focused primarily on the plays of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht; Warhol especially admired Brecht’s idea of realism and later applied the philosophy to his work (Lin 1). In the 1960s, Andy Warhol combined all of these early influences and experiences into a style that was distinctly his own and yet allowed others to be involved in the creative process. This came to be known in art history as American Pop art, a movement against the “original” as the bastion of the elite (Lin 1).

Warhol took the Pop Art sensibilities to its furthest extremes, single handedly breaking down the barriers between commercial and serious art. With his work in mass-produced art, documentary style movies, his defining of celebrity as an art form, and the drug- induced, fully documented, orgiastic parties he threw in his famed Factory, Andy Warhol became a major influence on the aesthetics of the decade.

Warhol concentrated on the surface of things, choosing his imagery from the world of commonplace objects such as dollar bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes (Columbia Encyclopedia 50810). He is variously credited with ridiculing and celebrating American middle-class values by erasing the distinction between popular and high culture. Monotony and repetition became the hallmarks of his multi-image, mass-produced silk-screen paintings: for many of these, such as the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, he employed newspaper photographs (Columbia Encyclopedia 50810).

Andy Warhol used a special type of line drawing known as the blotted line technique while he was still a college student. He used it widely in his art in the 1950s. In this method, Warhol made a pencil line drawing on nonabsorbent paper. He then attached the drawing to a second sheet of more absorbent Strathmore paper. He then inked the pencil lines on the original drawing. Then the second sheet of paper was folded along the hinge and the freshly inked lines were transferred by simply pressing the papers together. The process resulted in the stylistically broken and hesitant lines that are characteristic of Andy Warhol’s illustrations.

Warhol often colored his blotted line drawings with watercolor dyes or gold leaf (AWM, 2007a). Warhol’s technique also developed as he worked. Initially Warhol had used hand-cut stencils, rubber stamps, and wooden blocks to make repetitive images in his paintings.

In 1962, his assistant Nathan Gluck suggested using photo-silkscreen printing techniques. In this method, Warhol projected a photographic image onto a screen of treated silk, stretched on a frame and the image was later transferred onto the silk. To make the art more lively, Warhol tried to use inking and overlaps. He found that use of colors and the overlaps led to a variety of images and those images could be produced quickly. Moreover, these images appeared to move with each print. Warhol also could now use other people for printing purposes. Using labor and photo-silk printing technology, Warhol produced a vast amount of art (AWM, 2000).

Warhol’s drawings of the early 1960s have an experimental nature as the artist tried to create a fusion of various elements: photography, collage, written instructions of working studies, and on occasion, pencil and crayon or watercolor. He thus evolved from an artist who drew living things to an artist who identified and drew icons of pop culture such as soup cans, money, newspapers, political figures, and film stars.

Warhol’s drawings from 1968 until 1987 revolved around investigation of stardom. Exhibition curator Mark Francis writes, “For more than 30 years Andy Warhol created a coherent, consistent, and prolific body of drawings in which his deepest fears and his ideals of beauty were plainly and simply outlined” (Walker Art, 1999). When Marilyn Monroe committed suicide on August 4, 1962, Warhol was moved to produce a series of silk-screenings that made him very famous. In these works, he overemphasized her make-up and dyed blonde hair thereby symbolizing glamour and fame. Success in this line made him create images of other celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando (AWM 1).

The Beat Movement originated with a few writers in New York City in the 1950’s. It was a literary movement which emulated many of the ideals of the Bohemia of 19th Century Paris (Kopf et al 1). The beat writers went against the ideals of the mainstream culture, both in their lifestyles and literature. They were a tightly knit group of friends, comparable to Henry Murger and the Water Drinkers. It wasn’t until later on that they became known as a “movement.”

As with 19th Century Bohemia, the dominant culture was initially ambivalent toward the beats, but it later became “hip.” Just like the bohemians of the 19th century, the beats brought their art right into the social arena with them (Kopf et al 1). The seeds of radical change and revolution that happened in America in the 1960s began with the Beats movement. The Beats wrote in reaction to the materialistic, conformist America that they saw developing in the 1940’s. In other words, they wrote against the mainstream, using their art as both an escape from their world and a suggested solution to what they believed ailed it. Drug usage, sexual freedom, and a wandering lifestyle all characterized the beats, and this is why the dominant culture rejected them in the beginning.

Warhol’s endless promotion of camp taste and drug culture at “The Factory” and his personal involvement with the Velvet Underground proved to be an expression of bohemian culture of the 1960s. Bohemian art was the art of a mass culture: popular music, photography and fashion. Bohemians defined the association of genius with tragedy and self destruction. Andy Warhol contributed the most to the transformation whereby the bohemian moved from a character who symbolized the vicissitudes of ‘high art’ to a major influence on mass culture (Wilson 67).

Throughout the 1950s, he became one of the most successful illustrators of his time, and won numerous awards for his work from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. His work was based on photographs and other source images. He also included the delightfully quirky handwriting of his mother Julia in many of his works in this period. In 1956 Warhol traveled around the world for several weeks, visiting many countries in Asia and Europe. In the late 1950s he began to devote more energy to painting.

In 1960, he produced the first of his paintings depicting enlarged comic strip images, including Popeye and Superman (AWP 1). These were initially for use in a windows display at a New York department store. After his commercial art success, Andy became world-famous for his Pop Art.

When Marilyn Monroe committed suicide on August 4, 1962, Warhol was moved to produce a series of silk-screenings that made him very famous. In these works, he overemphasized her make-up and dyed blonde hair thereby symbolizing glamour and fame. Success in this line made him create images of other celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando. He then conducted his most successful exhibition at New York’s Stable Gallery. There, he showcased eighteen images, including Golden Marilyn, 129 Die in Jet, Red Elvis, and several soup can and Coca-Cola bottle pieces. The exhibition made Warhol a celebrated artist (AWM 1).

Despite his success in fine arts, he was also one of the most popular commercial fashion illustrators in New York City. He is best remembered for paintings that mirrored contemporary American life like Coca-cola bottles, televisions cheap advertisements and comic strips. When he found that an artist Roy Lichtenstein worked on similar kinds of comic strip imagery, Warhol tried to change tracks and do different kinds of drawings (AWM 1).

He soon started working on his independent films, some of which carried on the motif of repetition found in his Pop Art such as boredom and time. Among some of his most famous ones are Sleep, which features eight hours of a man sleeping, and Empire, a shot of the Empire State Building from sunrise to sunset. His films later became more complex, involving scripts and soundtracks. The Chelsea Girls is a film about the life at his studio called the Factory.

Warhol had a life-long fascination with Hollywood. In 1962 he began a large series of celebrity portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. He also began his series of “death and disaster” paintings at this time – images of electric chairs, suicides, and car crashes. Andy Warhol opened his famous studio, the Factory, in 1963. During his time in New York, Andy Warhol became friendly with Charles Henri Ford, who gave him the exposure to bohemian culture.

In 1963, Warhol’s Factory Studio soon became a stage on which hustlers and drag queens encountered the New York art world and street life met up with society debutantes and Harvard hipsters. The factory was the center of New York’s bohemian culture, where the most beautiful women, the most influential art-world figures, as well as many celebrities such as Mick Jagger and Lou Reed, congregated. Every evening at the Factory was a drug and sex filled party that lasted until sun rise. According to Kathy Acker, The Factory was a welcoming house for “all those the art world and hippie culture disparaged:.whores, pimps, working girls of all sorts, drug dealers, transsexuals and transvestites”(Acker 62).

This fast paced life style did not slow down Warhol’s artistic output; at the factory, he produced an incredible amount of work, which included paintings, silk screens, sculptures, and films. There, in the words of Wilson (68) “decadence became lifestyle, and voyeurism an art form as art and life merged into one continual performance, reaching new heights when the Velvet Underground created multimedia events at which all boundaries were abandoned” (Wilson 68).

Andy Warhol, developed in particular the relationship between avant-garde and mass culture to an astounding level. His films were mostly experimental; his paintings celebrated the ‘pop’ surface of life, so that the whole American landscape of drive-bys and hoardings became an aesthetic surface (Wilson 68). His words “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” became famous. He managed to combine fame with obscurity so that each intensified the impact of the other. In practice, obscurity was very much a part of Bohemian culture, providing the deeply bohemian themes of self-destruction and failure (Wilson 69).

Edith Sedgwick was a young handsome actress who starred in Andy Warhol’s underground movies. She soon became sucked into a relationship with him where she let herself be controlled by Andy Warhol. She also was trapped into drugs. Both Andy and Edie were androgynous. She was a girl who lived too hard, too fast, too much and too soon and so came to an early, unhappy end. Sedgwick went to The Factory regularly in since 1965 with her friend, Chuck Wein and it was then she was chosen to work in small roles in movies such as Vinyl and Horse.

Later she played major roles in his films such as Poor Little Rich Girl, Kitchen, Beauty No. 2, Outer and Inner Space, Prison, Lupe and Chelsea Girls. Sedgwick wore black leotards, mini dresses, and large chandelier earrings and had her hair cut short and sprayed her hair with silver color. Warhol christened her his “Superstar” and both were photographed together at various social outings (Comenas 1).

However, by late 1965, Sedgwick and Warhol’s relationship deteriorated and they stopped working together. Soon Sedgwick developed a relationship with Bob Dylan and is said to have been the inspiration behind Dylan’s seminal 1966 opus Blonde on Blonde, and the raucous stomper “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”. Sedgwick and Dylan’s relationship ended when Sedgwick found out that Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a secret ceremony – something that she apparently found out from Warhol during an argument at the Gingerman Restaurant in February 1966 (Comenas 1). She became dependent on barbiturates and later died in 1971 as a result of drugs and alcohol.

Bob Dylan was a revolutionary poet and musician who lived in New York during the same period as Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol and his cohorts at his famous Factory were defining and creating “Pop Art,” breaking down barriers between art and everyday life, at the same time Bob Dylan was forging blues, country, folk, and rock music with a poetic sensibility that would influence most forms of popular music in the coming decade. Andy Warhol made an experimental film with Paul Caruso titled The Bob Dylan story.

What was unique about Warhol’s artwork is that it focused not on the end result, but on the creative processes that produced the work of art. Reflecting this philosophy was the artist’s use of the silkscreen, a process that allowed multiple identical images to be produced by anyone: Warhol liked to have his friends create prints using his silkscreens. Most of Warhol’s creative work at this time took place in his studio, which he called “the Factory”.

This work, done between 1962 and 1964, ranged from portraits of friends and celebrities to car crashes to electric chairs to consumer products. Perhaps the most famous of his Factory work – consumer product images of Campbell’s Soup, Brillo boxes, green stamps, and Coca-Cola – distinctly point to Warhol’s fascination with America’s growing identification with brand-name labels (Lin 1). In 1962 Warhol had his first show in the Stable Gallery. It was a huge success, widely reported in the press and fully sold out.

From 1966 onward, Andy Warhol concentrated on making films, initially intent on studying the lives of the people surrounding him. The first films for which he gained recognition were shot between 1963 and 1964, a total of eight hours, with the titles of Sleep, Kiss, Haircut, Eat, Blow Job, and Empire. His films carried his philosophy like his paintings. They focused more on the creative process. The subjects were mostly ordinary people (Lin 1). In The Chelsea Girls (1966), a seven-hour voyeuristic look into hotel rooms, he used projection techniques that constituted a startling divergence from established methods.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967), came into the studio and shot Warhol in the chest, apparently because of a play she had written. He recovered from the near-fatal shooting after a five-hour operation. While recuperating he painted a large series of portraits of Happy Rockefeller, the wife of the Governor of New York (Wrbican 1).

It was Warhol’s masterstroke to realize that the best method of electrifying the old-master portrait tradition with sufficient energy to absorb the real, living world was through the photographic image. When Warhol took a photographic silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe’s head, set it on gold paint, and let it float on high in a timeless, spaceless heaven he was creating, in effect, a secular saint for the 1960s. And when he reproduced the same incorporeal divinity not as a single unit but as a nonstop series, rolling off an invisible press in endless multiples, he offered a kind of religious broadsheet for popular consumption. By accepting the photograph directly into the domain of pictorial art as the actual base for the image on canvas, Warhol was able to portray the visual and moral network of modern life.

Andy Warhol’s paintings are deceptively simple as his paintings. The paintings are of canned, commercial images, whether Campbell Soup, Marilyn Monroe, or of scenes of destruction and death, an auto crash, an electric chair. The image always has a context and a history before Warhol uses it: he takes the second-hand or the familiar and presents it freshly, with immediacy. His paintings showcase the essential symbols of daily life drained of their force through repetition. Hence, they evoke powerful feelings in the social consciousness of the individual. There is no image so simple that it means only one thing, no image so familiar that it has lost its meaning (Glueck 19). The impact grows through repetition; the forms dissolve into patterns on the canvas, and then regroup in fresh recognition.

That Warhol could paint simultaneously Warren Beatty and electric chairs, Troy Donahue and race riots, Marilyn Monroe and fatal car crashes, may seem to indicate a perversely cool and passive personality. But on reflection, on is likely to realize that this numb, voyeuristic view of contemporary life, in which the grave and the trivial, the fashionable and the horrifying, blandly coexist as passing spectacles, is a deadly accurate mirror of a commonplace experience in modern art and life.

Andy Warhol’s work compelled viewers to see the moral truth and the falsehood of conventional moral pieties. The facts of modern life are presented through pictures. These artistic expressions were often more powerful than the louder screams of expressionist psychology.

Culturally, Andy Warhol exploited his special relationship with food, and organized ritual lunches for highly selective groups of people, each of which was strictly staged. He brought very famous and glamorous people together with a few less famous and glamorous people who very much wanted to be part of fame and glamour and with simple food and inexpensive wine would persuade them to have their portraits done. It became a multi-million business.

At the end of 1974 the price of a Warhol portrait was $25,000. That was actually the price for the first portrait. If he thought he could sell more to a client, he would do a second which he sold for $15,000, a third for 10,000, a fourth for 5,000, and so on. The additional works were very popular among art dealers. Thus Warhol became an artist who conducted business according to very strict marketing principles, places products at well chosen values, and as a consequence saw the value of his work increase. Andy Warhol is a good example of an artist who created great economic value. He was also a fabulous queen, a fan of prurience and pornography, and a great admirer of the male body.

Much has been speculated about Andy Warhol’s sex life. He featured both men and women in his artistic endeavors, and his entourage was a mingling of the two sexes. Most people tend to think Warhol was gay, and he did have boyfriends. However, it is a mystery as to whether or not he actually was intimate with these men; Warhol’s attitude was more asexual than homosexual.

Andy Warhol later diversified into several art forms and proved himself as a talented painter, sculptor, graphic artist, filmmaker, music producer, author and publisher. But behind each one of these roles, it was his extraordinarily creative drawing skills that laid the foundation for success. Towards the mid-sixties, he began working with the band The Velvet Underground. He broadened his activities into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured the rock and roll band The Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground went on to become one of the most influential rock bands in history.

To the music of the band he orchestrated an interactive show consisting of images and lights and called it The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The mixed media showcase created an international sensation when it opened at the DOM nightclub in New York City. It was an onslaught on the senses, and it described in music and art the feeling of young America.

Throughout the 1970s, Warhol frequently socialized with celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote, both of whom had been important early subjects in his art. He started to receive dozens-and soon hundreds-of commissions for painted portraits from wealthy socialites, music and film stars, and other clients. The 1970s was also a period of experimentation for Warhol. He made 3 versions of a sculpture called Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall) for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970 (Wrbican 1).

From the 1970s onward, Warhol continued to produce a prolific number of paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings: Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, Camouflage, and many more, culminating in his series of Last Supper paintings, which were shown in Milan in early 1987 (Wrbican 1).

Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987, due to complications following surgery to remove his gall bladder. In 1988, a ten-day auction of his enormous estate of art and antiques raised over 20 million dollars for The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Andy Warhol Museum was announced in 1989, and opened in Pittsburgh in 1994. For almost two decades, Andy Warhol had maintained the position of an infamous media icon, notorious for his parties and respected for his artistic taste; he backed young and upcoming artists, lending his support to the development of modern art in America.

He had lived for 58 years, helping to develop a new scene for American art and a new ideology in the artist’s lexicon. Andy Warhol’s impact on the art world cannot be overlooked, and his influence lingers to this day, from Brain-juice.com’s soup can logo to the cinematic techniques behind The Blair Witch Project. Thus Andy Warhol was the single person who brought about the transformation of bohemian culture from an individualistic perspective to a mass cultural form.

Works Cited

Acker, Kathy (1989). “Blue Valentine” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray. British Film Institute Publication. London.

AWM (2007a). Andy Warhol’s Methods and Techniques. Web.

AWM (2007b). Andy Warhol: Life and Art. Web.

AWP (Andy Warhol Posters) (2008). Andy Warhol Posters ‘n’ Pop. Web.

Comenas, Gary (2008). Edie Sedgwick. Web.

Glueck, Grace (1964). Art Notes: Boom? Review of exhibition at Stable Gallery. New York Times. p. 19.

Hopf, Courtney; Kogan, Leslie and Brown, Rachel (2001). Beat Culture: A Later Manifestation of Bohemia. Web.

Lin, Amy (2008). Andy Warhol. Web.

Sherer, Danielle (2000). Gallery Attendants Put a New Face on The Andy Warhol Museum. Carnegie Magazine. Web.

The Columbia Encyclopedia (2007). Warhol, Andy. The Columbia Encyclopedia. Sixth Edition. Columbia University Press. New York. 2007.

Wilson, Elizabeth (2002). Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts. Tauris Parke Paperbacks.

Wrbican, Matt (2008). American Masters: Andy Warhol. Wrbican. Web.

Life as a fullness of picturesque art

Life is an interesting thing – you never know what kind of surprise it will afford. This becomes clear when we realize how many things of nonmaterial character we already have by the pains of creative people. As I see, the art of direct observation is Painting, of course. Great painters get the popularity, as a rule, after being dead. A very few numbers of them became popular while alive.

Now I want to pay your special attention to the two outstanding artists of different periods: Leonardo da Vinci and Andy Warhol.

Leonardo da Vinci’s glimpse on art and Mona Lisa

First, da Vinci was in medieval times the genius, numerous inventions of whom helped us to progress only now. His creativeness of mind helped him to supervise the ideal structure of the Universe. It seems as if he observed things internally looking at the reality which was not comprehensible for a common eye. This feature made him genius afterward and was a motive power for him to create the masterpiece of pictorial art “Mona Lisa”.

Yet the Mona Lisa is one of those works of art which each generation must reinterpret. It is also to misunderstand Leonardo, for the Mona Lisa’s smile is the supreme example of that complex inner life, caught and fixed in durable material, which Leonardo in all his notes on the subject claims as one of the chief aims of art. A quarry so shy must be approached with every artifice. (Kenneth Clark 119)

Warhol’s interpretation of the masterpiece

Leonardo himself always thought that among arts the hardest is Painting and opposed to it the art of Sculpture. Following the traditions of ancient times, he tried to collect as many disciples, as he could nurture. Da Vinci never appraised his talent highly. Mona Lisa is a whole mystery. In every part of the picture, the author illustrates something concealed and encoded: whether it is a smile or eyes, or background. Rocky spires and pinnacles behind Mona Lisa perhaps express her laden life and the mood of her smile.

In its essence, Mona Lisa’s smile is gothic, the smile of the Queens and Saints at Rheims or Strasbourg, but since Leonardo’s ideal of beauty was touched by pagan antiquity, she is smoother and more fleshly than the Gothic saints. (Kenneth Clark 120)

Earlier we concluded that every generation must re-interpret da Vinci following their thinking and apprehension of the time it lives in. One of the twentieth century’s most creative, prolific, and influential artists Andy Warhol could not, but touch upon a problem of understanding da Vinci himself. His doubled Mona Lisa reflects the familiar Latin proverb: Repetitio est Mater studiorum. It is for us to keep this masterpiece in mind forever. Despite his busy Manhattan commercial life, he tries to make some gestures to accurately reveal the beauty within a mass culture using image repetition.

The topic of repetition is also obviously important and interesting here. In paintings like Thirty Are Better Than One (repetitions of the Mona Lisa), the Marilyn diptych, or 100 Coke Bottles, the repetition of the same image in the same painting makes repetition itself the subject of the painting. (Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, Jose Esteban Munoz 132)

Warhol did not add something to the picture of da Vinci, Leonardo enclosed too many special remarks, that may stay ulterior till the last.

Conclusion

Both artists felt their need to express a beau-ideal of a woman, one through their vision and technique, another through the interpretation in the context of contemporaneity.

References

Clark, K. (1939). Leonardo Da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist. New York: Macmillan.

(1996). Pop-out: Queer Warhol (J. Doyle, J. Flatley, & J. E. MuÑoz, Ed.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Introduction

Andrew Warhola or Andy Warhol, as he was better known, was a versatile talented person who excelled in various departments. He was best known as an American artist, in the context of pop art, and his fame and ventures covered different pastures as a filmmaker, printmaker, and record producer. He was also an author and stalwart of visual art movement with initial commercial illustrator career. Warhol (1928 –1987) reached his zenith with his painting Eight Elvises (1963) and it is regarded as his best work of art and it was priced $100 million. (Colacello, 88)

Creativity

Creative process of Andy Warhol is a psychological and societal process relating to the creation of new innovative ideas or conceptions, or new relations of the creative mind among accessible notions, thoughts or perceptions. The creative process is driven by the development of either conscious or unconscious awareness. A different idea of creativity is that it is purely the process of creating or generating something new and original. In the process of describing the creative process of Andy Warhol it is evident how closely the word ‘Genius’ is intertwined with their creativity. Intellectual brilliance in combination with highest quality of creativity brings in the concept of genius. Beautiful ideas and their proper implementations which have a profound influence on the observers get tagged with the label of creative genius. Individuals are often said to be creative on the basis of his lifestyle, his works in respective fields and their attitudes. The creative process can be perceived as imaginative, supple, not stereotyped, influential and authoritarian. (Weisberg, 1993)

Warhol’s Creativity may intuitively appear to be simple but in actuality it is a complex phenomenon. Creativity is definitely an elaborate process with the product being an outcome of the implementation of the creativity. Though author Daniel Joseph Boorstin mentioned in his book ‘The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination’ that “even the greatest Greek sculptures, potters, painters and architects were not individualists” (Boorstin, 94) it can be stated that art and creativity is fundamentally governed by the flow of emotion.

It commences in a wide spectrum physical word and lies in its preparatory stage. When struck with a novel idea or concept the first thing which sets in is a vision of how beautiful it will be when it actually comes into existence. The mind thinks about the way the idea may work. Along with vision comes anticipation which makes the mind believe that the idea will work out to actually be something striking. The following action requires the conceiver of the idea to take the plunge and implement the idea. This is the most decisive part of the entire process. There are many creative ideas which do not have an outcome and remain unfinished because of being curbed at this stage. There may be many emotions such as excitement and suspicion involved at this stage. As the process advances the clarity of the idea is enhanced and implementation proceeds. Subsequently, after a long tussle in the creators mind a product finally emerges and is validated by the real world. (Weisberg, 165)

The genesis of his artistic composition is subject to the dichotomy between inspiration combined with innovation and elaboration in consort with skillful organization. His creative process was often a combination of the two. His works highlighted craftsmanship but at the same time he held spontaneous innovation in high esteem. Contrasting the different available versions of art and sculpture compositions reveal that isolated bars were cut without substitution and in addition, the arrangement in which formal segments came into subsistence is frequently very dissimilar to the consequent versions. However, he upheld a relatively conventional notion of work of art across his career. The concept of ‘work in progress’ (which actually has a Romantic origin) or the post-modern perception of open work can only be associated with the artist’s creative process. The poetic detail in the conceptual phase of the composition provides a deep insight into the artist’s creative process.

Painting

The painter Andy Warhol epitomized post-modernism more absolutely and added an additional thrust to it to move it further more than any other artist. The style’s extremism was rooted in the resolve to paint not mere reality but the bearing in mind of reality, the act of awareness and perception of nature itself, by presenting how light, particularly bright light, is likely to liquefy the colors and appearance of the scene. The explanation of this effect was anchored in unprompted, broken, prancing brushwork — if possible articulated in paint applied in front of the focused item, en plein air. The imagery formed is so recognizable at the moment that it’s possible to fail to remember that post-modernism brought in a newly multifaceted consciousness for its original spectators. The occurrence of light was superior, and along with that the physical boldness of the painted exterior was also enhanced. Paint and actuality existed together in finely tuned tension. His illustrious lifestyle is presented to be equally a private utopia as well as a very fundamental part of his creative processes. While he time and again refused the utilization of drawing as an essential part of his creative process, which was a stance well documented in talks and discussions with his critics, documents which tend to challenge this view have come out in the recent past. The part that Andy Warhol’s graphic work plays as a primary facet of his creative process has been intricately been studied and continues to be extensively scrutinized. (Boorstin, 85)

Sexuality

The idea of Andy Warhol on gender is very unique. He believed that the male sex is basically an incomplete sex whereas the female is complete. However egoistic a male may be it is certain that the male himself feels that he is lacking in definite ways what the female actually possesses in respect of tenderness, love, affection and cerebral relations. In a way a man is an incomplete woman and a man knows that quite well deep inside. In certain ways a male is always interested in becoming a female and sexual intercourse is one way of getting as close as possible to a female experience for a male. The inability to acquire the qualities of a woman makes a man indulge in matters that are unnecessary and artificial like going into war and inventing the concept of money with an unlimited lust for meaningless and needless power exercise and manipulations. The male also manipulates his emotions on being a father by imposing himself and considering the offspring as commodities. The male acts as if he is a sperm bank and as in the modern days there are artificial sperm bank available there is hardly any need of the male in the society. Being territorial and maintaining privacy are other aspects of a man that proves his incompetence and as he knows this open secret quite well enough he tries to acquire as much as room possible for himself. This sense of territory makes him go to the extent to make a woman a distinctive sex that is specifically different from him. This is almost a case of identity crisis for a man. Thus to protect his identity he creates authority, morality, religion, philosophy and other conceptual prejudices. (Husslein, 115)

Influence of post-modernism

Defining Andy Warhol’s Post Modernism or post-modernist art is not an easy task since it has acquired characteristics from a wide spectrum of periods, while integrating a variety of architectural values gathered by people of different places into a particular style, which was then popularized as Post-Modernism. According to Charles Jencks, the matter of Andy Warhol’s post modernism is an amalgamation of different ideas and thought processes and together there was referred to as postmodernism. Zimmerman believes in the context of Andy Warhol aspects of art under the parameter of multicultural environment. It is denoted that under modernism the juxtaposition of cultural milieu was an initial set up but during the development of globalization and post-modern ethical principals it is a fundamental need to indulge into the multicultural dimensions. However, it is also to be mentioned that multi-culturist environment is not easily championed and there several ethical problems related to it. From the parameters of art, it is suggested that one must involve deep into the cultural differences and understand the ethical and social differences while incorporating an architectural setting in a foreign culture environment. (Zimmerman, 78-79) Though Andy Warhol sometimes borrow style from historical inspirations to achieve what should be regarded as aesthetically pleasing, it breaks away from the rigidity that the structural grids of Modernism insists, and disregards Modernism’s values of character and order of traditions. Ultimately, Andy Warhol’s Post-Modern art persisted to fly into a design that is full of expression and fantasy with the object of entertaining rather than impressing.

Evaluating the artist

The main characteristic of Andy Warhol as an artist is anything that anyone does which has a profound effect on somebody or something else. Some artist can be considered more complex, and some art can be considered simpler in contrast. But, the fact of the matter is, in the eye of the beholder, artist’s expression could be anything. Simply put, something that is aesthetically pleasing is something that appeals to the senses.

For instance, if Andy Warhol wanted to create a painting to give off an aesthetic feeling of hope, probably there would not be an over abundance of dark colors. Dark colors are often used to show calmness or even more commonly, something sad and depressing. Also, when painting, if you use wider and more circular strokes with a lighter press on your brush, you’ll give off more depressing tones and colors. So, it would be more advisable to use lighter colors and more agile handling of the brush. Lighter colors often give off a feeling of warmth and happiness, which is something that you would like to be doing if you would like to create something hopeful. But, to truly create something that gives off a strong aesthetic presence, you usually must feel some sort of emotional attachment to whatever it is you are working on.

The characteristic of a postmodern artist lies in the feeling for whatever it is you are working on. Only then will you truly pour out everything from your heart and mind. When you can accomplish this, you can create something with true aesthetic value in the line of a characteristic of the artist. If you can describe your emotions in your artwork, it becomes easier for others to understand what you were trying to do, and more often, give them a stronger emotional sense. In a way this creates a bond between the artist and the observer, allowing true aesthetic value to be created within a work of art and this is the main characteristic of the artist.

In a way, Andy Warhol’s works became something more than the vision and installation for the viewer. It becomes identification of postmodernist ideology too for an individual. It became the tool of decentralized exhibition and sub alters manifestation too. Several artifacts and art movement objects appear to be scattered all along the artwork that started off with individuals being interested into specific issues that has been ignited within them by the dint of visual and mental panorama. This is in complete alignment with the basic aspects of postmodern influenced thought process. (Lamb, 229)

It is true that the meaning of visual aesthetics varies from person to person and beholder to beholder but the end means of Andy Warhol is to provide an effective instrument of self-realization and self-enlightenment other than being just a medium of communication. It is true the meaning of postmodernism is vast and it can be determined that everything that has been mentioned in this regard and is the understanding of this vastness and its meaning mush like the construction of the Eight Elvises in a deconstructive and decentralized manner. (Lamb, 225)

Thus, it can be seen that to a person viewing can be a multi dimensional tool of existence strategies. For an individual visual impetus comes out of the nature and subsequent material to ascertain the proper value of existence and survival in proper and just manner of sanity so much so that he tries to breaks all barriers to use vision as a medium of artistic expression too. As a result, it can be ascertained that the meaning of vision, in accordance to the architect, is much more far spread than it is conceptualized in common conceptions. (Lamb, 224)

Conclusion

One curious aspect of Andy Warhol is the multiple dimensions of truth used in the image. The artist is presenting his versions of his personal achievements to the spectators to gain access to him and these are more always presented in half-truths and lies through vision, which the spectator is to decipher. These half-truths, illusions, and lies are represented in the artwork as costumes and sets are generally in base colors like green, blue and red. Apart from the aspects of philosophy and political correctness, the basic theme of Andy Warhol, what are most significant about his artworks are the breathtaking clarity in presentation of thought that presents stillness and action sequences at the same frame.

Works cited

Boorstin, Dean. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 2003.

Colacello, Bob. Holy terror: Andy Warhol close up. London: HarperCollins, 1990.

Husslein, Uwe. Pop goes art: Andy Warhol & Velvet Underground. NY: Wuppertal, 1990.

Lamb, David. Cult to Culture: The Development of Civilization. Wellington: National Book Trust Weisberg, Richard. Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius. LA: Freeman & Company, 1998.

Zimmerman, Michael. Ethics, Multiculturalism, and Globalization. Tulane University Professional Ethics, 2003.

Introduction

The Post-Modernist Movement of pop art and culture in the latter half of the twentieth century was a revolutionary movement and it was started by the American artist Andy Warhol’s very ‘mundane’ looking paintings of Campbell’s soup cans which were exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Also called the ‘Prince of Pop’, Andy Warhol was a quirky but genuinely gifted artist with other feathers in his caps: A film-maker, a photographer, print-maker, musician and writer. (Williams, 59)

Biography

Early life

Born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as the youngest sibling, he had developed a taste for drawing, coloring, cutting and pasting pictures since childhood, encouraged and aided by his mother who was an artist. Even though he contracted the deadly St. Vitus’ disease which upsets the nervous system and causes pink blotches on the skin, he made up for missing elementary school by improving his artistic abilities while in bed-rest.

After high school, he chose his path by studying art at the Carnegie Museum. Always a bit of a loner, he loved watching movies and was enamored of celebrities which later shows up in his paintings and photos of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali. Andy Warhol graduated with a major in pictorial design in 1949 with a revolutionary technique of art known as the blotted-line technique which would influence his style of painting immensely.

Profession

Next, he moved to New York and chose commercial art as his profession, becoming very popular for commercial advertisements for illustrious names like Tiffany and I. Miller. He soon shifted to the emerging style of Pop Art, begun in England in mid-1950. This kind of art included making faithful representations of everyday items, to symbolize the increasing consumerism and materialism of the era. Andy liked this trend and started out painting Coke cans and then made his masterpieces— A realistic painting of a dollar note and Campbell’s soup cans, which were his favorite item for lunch.

Fame

After his historically famous exhibition of the 32 Campbell soup cans sold for $1000 each, there was no looking back for Andy Warhol. In 1962, he developed another artistic technique called the Silkscreen method which used a piece of silk as a stencil so as to allow reproductions of similar images on different images, a style of pop art. This enabled Andy to take his art to a larger level. HE soon became famous of his paintings and his photographs of celebrities and in between 1963-1968, he also turned to films, making almost 60 avant-garde movies. His work and associates were always centered on his workshop called ‘The Factory’. (Colacello, 174)

Photography

According to William Ganis’s article on Andy Warhol’s photography, Andy Warhol became publicly acknowledged as a photographer in 1985, when he appeared on ‘The Love Boat’ and started taking random photos of the guests on the boat. His photo series called ‘Fashion’ came out in 1979-80 where he had photographed models and beauties in bathing suits. Andy Warhol is primarily known as an artist and a film maker but very few know that he invented and popularized Polaroid photography and took almost 66,000 classic photographs which are valued at over $80 million posthumously. His most famous photographs include the Red Elvis (1962) and the Orange Car Crash (1964). (Williams, 225)

Andy Warhol was obsessed with documentation of his life and work in ‘The Factory’, of the celebrities he met or of the habits of his associates. Thus, his films also are based on the theme of voyeurism. He has been known to say: “A picture means I know where I am every minute….it’s a visual diary” (Liberatore, 1).

Andy Warhol’s Polaroid’s

Much of Andy’s silkscreen paintings have focused around photography as the Pop Art movement needed realistic, pictorial representations of objects or personalities. Earlier, his idea of images came from advertisement and newspapers, like his Marilyn Monroe series or his Elvis Photographs are actually representations of their photographs circulating in the media. This sparked a lot of debate about the authenticity of his photography. Thus, Andy Warhol adopted the Silkscreen technique, before moving on to Polaroid photography.

Andy Warhol believed in the mechanical, impersonal nature of photography which was non-traditional and was moving against the work of Abstract Expressionists, hailing to the modern age of painting. He experimented with repeated imagery in different colors and set-ups so as to heighten the sense of realism, reject any abstraction in art and also obscure the blurring lines between high art and the ‘lower’ forms of commercial art, like the images of advertising and commerce, which became a tradition of post-modernist painters and sculptors, who increasingly focused on the hyper-real or the mundane aspects of commercialized life. The inexpensive camera was the best medium for this objective gaze.

Warhol’s journey as a photographer begins in 1962 when he got his first Polaroid camera. He begins with the dispassionate anatomical images of male nudes and especially buttocks. In 1970-71, he developed his photography with the Big Shot Polaroid camera which allowed him to take close-ups and it came with an in-built flash. Warhol’s photography focuses on portraits and he developed a particular process for such photographs. The sitter was brought to ‘The Factory’ and Andy would interview the sitter and if it was a woman, then he would apply white make-up to her face like a Kabuki theatre actor and then wrap a cloth around her chest, giving a classical look under the flash. After the Polaroid had been taken, it was transferred to the acetates which would later be used to make silkscreens. As for male sitters, he would use the sitter’s hands to strike a pose, to hold a cigar or a cigarette, to enhance the personality.

After taking the Polaroid’s, Warhol would follow the careful procedure of listening to the sitter’s tapes and choose the images which he would later have rephotographed in 35mm, then have them printed as 8×10 inch acetates which would finally be enlarged to 40×40 inches as preparation for making a silkscreen. His assistants had been directed to alter the image at all stages. The process of changing a Polaroid shot to a silkscreen included the magic touch of Andy Warhol who mystically changed the ordinary to the artistic. (Hughes,276)

A particular trait of Warhol’s photography was his concentration on the face when he was photographing people. David Bourdon, a biographer of Warhol, states that Warhol’s portraits were always larger-than-life sized faces which seemed to be an aggrandizement of his sitter’s egos. Probably, this suited Warhol’s famous saying- “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” (Harris, 2007, 217). His biographer has labeled him a “court painter” to international celebrities. Warhol had photographed celebrities like John Lennon, Truman Capote, Jean Michel Basquiat, Georgia O’Keefe, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.

Portraits

He was also famous for his series of portraits of sports celebrities and athletes, shown in a curiously formal manner by Warhol who photographed them with uniforms and their equipment. However, Warhol failed to grasp their iconic status and their idolatry as he was not interested in their arena of professional sports. His shots include sports personalities like Tom Seaver, Pele, Willie Shoemaker, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Muhammad Ali, the last person being able to capture some command over the camera.

Techniques

Warhol showed his sitter in tight close-ups and a flattened relief technique which would help in magnifying the sitter’s personality and help in distancing Warhol, this would help in drawing a line between idolization and absolute desecration of the iconic personas. Another interesting fact is proved form this; Warhol’s secret belief was that he too should have been a movie star and thus, he chooses the Polaroid form for celebrities, it was the most glamorous. Traditionally, portraits were meant to be a document or a metaphor about the person. Warhol subverts the tradition by making his portraits into impersonal designs and talismans of someone’s existence, however, with no message or moral behind the surface. He would also stitch up different photographs belonging to different time periods.

From the 1980’s, Warhol focuses on photographing commercial objects like high heeled women’s shoes and Brillo boxes. In 1980-81, he also did a series of photographs on the American Icons like Dracula, Howdy Doody, Uncle Sam and items like cheeseburgers, soup cans and comic strips, returning to his Pop Art days. (Williams, 88)

Sense of dramatization

Warhol’s dramatized; self-conscious portraits are also part of his photographic skills. He always used props like a wild blond wig, a boxer’s gloves or a skull perched on his head to glorify his position as artist but mask his real identity. He never relaxes in front of the camera and tries to ironically glance at his difference from his surroundings. His series of self- portraits also include the photos of himself taking the shots of some personality or other people at work in his studio.

Thus, the Polaroid is central to the idea of Warhol’s content and style of his work. Though they were meant to be seen as a medium of Pop Art, the Polaroid’s have come to take on an independent identity, as a neutral, tape-recording device where the observer has mechanically given directions for the portrait. Many art critics have tried to decipher Warhol’s personality or a hidden metaphor or symbol in his photographs and paintings however, Warhol famously commented, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (Warhol, Michelson and Buchloh, 71).

Experimentation

His Polaroid’s actually go beyond this statement as Andy was always experimenting with the representation of the photos he took. He spent hours trying to relate to his sitters and try to reconstruct a piece of their identity, as seen by his photographer’s eye, in the silkscreen portraits that he made ultimately. Thus, his photographs became metaphors of consumerism, the desire for consumption and voyeuristic distancing, and all elements of postmodern life. Even in his wild self-portraits, he is caught in his desire to be a celebrity. Andy Warhol was a very keen artist but also an acute businessman as he confesses himself- “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art” (Williams, 223).

Death and after

A historic and critical event was the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, when his protégé, feminist art critic and actress in his film, I, A Man. Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in his studio, ‘The Factory’, when he was with art critic and curator Mario Amaya. She had been refused a script on that day from ‘The Factory’ and so she shot at Warhol and Amaya. Warhol was critically injured and doctors even had to cut open his chest and massage his heart to revive him. This incident made him very weak physically. It had a deep impact on him psychologically and influenced his last pieces of work. (Hughes, 117)

Conclusion

Andy Warhol died in New York City from a gallbladder surgery post-operative cardiac arrest. The date was February 22, 1987. He was buried in St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh. According to his will, a foundation was created with his estate for the advancement of the visual arts which was officially founded as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 1987. (Colacello, 273) The Foundation has been encouraging new artists and techniques of art and photography since then. In addition, the Artists Rights Society in the U.S. has been preserving the stills from the major Warhol films which can be viewed by many. Workshops are held regularly in the Andy Warhol Foundation which teaches the techniques of Silkscreen painting and Polaroid Light and Object Photography, the two legacies of Andy Warhol.

References

Colacello, Bob. Holy terror: Andy Warhol close up. Michigan: HarperCollins, 1990.

Harris, John. Enhancing evolution: the ethical case for making better people. NY: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Hughes, Robert. American visions: the epic history of art in America. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Liberatore, Wendy. “Andy Warhol’s photos reflect urge to chronicle every minute of life”. Daily Gazette. Sunday, 2008. Daily Gazette. Web.

Warhol, Andy, Michelson, Annette and B. H. D. Buchloh. Andy Warhol: Volume 2. LA: MIT Press, 2001.

Williams, Robert. Art theory: an historical introduction. LA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.

The primary theme of the exhibition is to show the collection of the pieces of Andy Warhol’s art. The painter’s exquisite choice of colors and techniques makes his works arouse a whole set of feelings in the observers. His paintings done in the acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen and canvas impress with their vivacity and bright accents. Warhol had the talent to transform his characters into pop-culture idols.

A Uniform List of the Objects

1. Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482) (see fig. 1). This painting will open the exhibit as it is connected with the glorious past of the painting art.
2. Liza Minelli (see fig. 2). A painting of Warhol’s close friend is dazzling as Liza herself.
3. John Lennon (see fig. 3). Warhol was called “the Beatles of the visual arts” (Hoppe), and it is symbolic to have one of the Beatles in the exhibit.
4. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, from Reigning Queens (see fig. 4). The famous monarch looks in a completely different light in Warhol’s performance.
5. Debbie Harry (see fig. 5). The portrait of a musical innovator is so imposing that the viewers get a feeling that she is looking deep in their eyes.
6. Gold Marilyn Monroe (see fig. 6). The fabulous Marilyn by the remarkable Warhol.
7. Carolina Hehhera (see fig. 7). The portrait which the famous actress received in exchange for a piece of her jewelry.
8. Doda Voridis (see fig. 8). Another work which smashes the boundaries between the pop-culture and avant-garde.
9. Michael Jackson (see fig. 9). This portrait was commissioned by The Times to become a cover for one of the paper’s editions.
10. Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait (see fig. 10). The thematic exhibition will finish with the artist’s self-portrait in all glory of his sensational art.

Works Cited

Hoppe, David. “Andy Warhol Enterprises: New IMA Exhibit Is a Fresh Take on Warhol.” NUVO, 2010, Web.

Warhol, Andy. Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait. 1986, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, Mugrabi Collection.

Warhol, Andy. Carolina Herrera. 1979, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Warhol, Andy. Debbie Harry. 1980, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Warhol, Andy. Details of Renaissance Paintings (Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1482). 1984, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Warhol, Andy. Doda Voridis. 1977, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Warhol, Andy. Gold Marilyn Monroe. 1962, silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Celebrity Art Museum, New York.

Warhol, Andy. John Lennon. 1985/86, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas, Celebrity Art Museum, New York.

Warhol, Andy. Liza Minelli. 1979, acrylic and screen-printing ink on linen, Celebrity Art Museum, New York.

Warhol, Andy. Michael Jackson. 1984, synthetic polymer painting on canvas, Celebrity Art Museum, New York.

Warhol, Andy. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, from Reigning Queens. 1985, screen-print in colors, Celebrity Art Museum, New York.

Pop is a shortened term for popular. Pop art cannot be claimed as the most popular art movement in history if world acceptance and popularity itself is considered. Many classical artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci until today overshadow the rest before and after them. However, Pop art the label and movement indicates the subject matter and not the popularity. Pop art tackled popular consumption products and individuals. This is the period when Andy Warhol took on common everyday objects and turned them into art. It seemed superficial at most. If Warhol and the movement did not become popular and widely accepted, he could have been labelled to be trying so hard. But as Klawans suggested, “Warhol didn’t turn a Brillo box into art; he turned art into a Brillo box,” (p 177).

With regards to commodities as art, Warhol was quoted, “I think everybody should be a machine.” He added, “I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It’s happening here all by itself,” referring to the free-market United States (quoted by Klawans, p 178).

Warhol’s depiction is a “surface resemblance” as Klawans (183) suggested. Warhol “…had come into his own [… and] learned to show us the corpse in the mirror,” (183).

In another point, Warhol was compared to Oscar Wilde who said, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances” in The Picture of Dorian Gray (quoted from Mattick, p 965). Here, Warhol is considered by philosopher Arthur Danto (459) as the “nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.” This has been in reference to the Brillo Boxes exhibited in 1964 at New York’s Stable Gallery. Warhol’s depiction close to their common, everyday likeness familiar to every rich and poor consumers have stripped art off its “accidental” (Mattick, 966) superficiality so that art has become all things common.

It was observed by Klawans (185) that art for quite a long time reflected life, then art shifted to images that are insisted as real. In Warhol’s time, he showed the world the true status of objects, of man’s machines as well as the current culture of mass production and consumption. He had shown how man elevated his products to be his equal. In Mattick’s observation, “Artworks had become more valuable than people; and the century that had learned to mass-produce images was also the century of mass-produced death. Why not decide that the world was as inanimate as the art-that the figure in the mirror was a corpse? That way the art, at least, could retain its integrity,” (p 186).

Warhol himself acknowledged his own thoughts about his artworks about an interview of his Coke images: that the beverages symbolized equality of the celebrity, the king, the rich and the poor: they all drink coke. On the other side of the spectrum, he was speaking against the differences of these peoples’ status despite a similarity (emphasis by this writer).

Andy Warhol’s Pop art both celebrated and lamented the culture and situation of his time (or even up this free-market time). It was a celebration that provided him a platform to express his genius as many critic and philosophers had agreed. At the same time, his art also expressed his lamentation, the triumph of objects and everyday consumables over humanity. The point Warhol tried to show the world was that there is no such thing as equality despite the same experiences individuals share in their everyday lives such as Campbell’s soups, coca-cola drink, or the Brillo washing agents. What he did was bring art to the common people. That art is also a commodity and that in a way; a symbolical equality was achieved, if only through images that is accessed by everyone: rich or poor.

Works Cited

Danto, Arthur. “Andy Warhol,” The Nation, 3, p. 459. 1989.

Klawans, Stuart. “The Corpse in the Mirror: The Warhol Wake.” Grand Street, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 176-187. 1989.

Mattick, Paul. “The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 965-987. 1998.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Ward, Lock, and Company, 1891.

Bansky was very good and helping Warhol promote his style, and worked alongside Warhol as a sort of idea man (Carson 34). The viewer of Warhol’s work is tempted to read beyond the surface of his work and to try and discover what the artist thought – and this was often difficult since his work embodied a certain blankness or lack of signifiers of sincerity. For example, his images of suicide would make one wonder whether the artist is horrified by death or perceives it as funny. His depictions of the Campbell’s Soup cans were received with similarly mixed reactions – was he making a cynical joke on the cheapness of American mass culture, or are the soup cans homage to the simple comforts of home? Warhol’s refusal to speak to how his work ought to be read made them all the more interesting. With Warhol’s effect, the interpretation of his works was left entirely up to his audience.

Thus, affect is taking things at their face value, and not looking beyond what was on the surface of artistic work. In Warhol’s effect, there was no provocation to read the artist’s hidden meaning or inner mind beyond the surface of his canvas. Affect represents not just being deadpan, but being almost numb to an image that has been made prominent, repetitively, in the public sphere through mass reproduction or advertising. Bansky understood the draw of actors and actresses and inspired Warhol to include such famous individuals in his works (Flatley 86). Many individuals were interested in buying portraits of their favorite actors and hanging them in their homes. The affectlessness that characterized Warhol’s work is there in the repetition of stars’ faces, such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor, who became subjects of the artist’s work. These actors did not represent self-portraiture but were the mediums used by Warhol to emphasize affectlessness. They represent a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator who views an image with which he or she has been bombarded in a media-saturated culture.

On the contrary, Warhol used actors and popular media icons in his work not to further emulate them, but to show how emulation of these famous personalities was something that was drilled into our unconscious by mass media (Cutrone 32). For the actors in his film, Warhol preferred to focus on their “humiliating particularities” rather than any performance of self-abstraction. He intended to project himself and his stars into publicity through transcendence of particularities. His use of white-on-white connotes the neutrality of a social group, wherein there is difficulty in telling people apart, whether they be famous or not. In 1962, Warhol reproduced cinematic beauties in several of his Female Movie Star Composites. For instance, he edits together the head and forehead of Greta Garbo, the eyes of Joan Crawford, the nose of Marlene Dietrich, and the lips and chin of Sophia Loren. Only their initials identified these various facial elements of these popular movie stars. Their unfinished appearance suggests they were meant to serve as studies or sketches for larger projects, instead of being taken as individual pieces in themselves. Yet even though Warhol tries to indicate the “whiteness” of these subjects, as neutral objects difficult to tell apart, the artist himself recognized both the requirement for inclusion in the elite Hollywood circles while at the same time confirming his personal life into achieving that impossible ideal of Hollywood beauty and perfection. He even went so far as to drop the A in his name, which was originally Warhola, since the extra A sounded too clunky and ethnic. In propagating the philosophy of maintaining an affectless, neutral attitude towards art and its appreciation, there is a seamless continuity between the surfaces of Warhol’s body and his images, as the products of the artist’s self-abstraction which was designed exactly to avoid “any rupture of self-difference between ordinary life and publicity.” (Cooke 32)

In creating portraits at his Factory, Warhol became a medium through which these faces took on a recognizable identity and became in many ways his superstars. Bansky’s inspiration doubtless assisted with this as well as Warhol’s ideas. Bansky was aware of the fact that individuals would pay top dollar for a beautiful portrait of a favorite celebrity. Yet his affectless element persists. For instance, in his portraits of Liza Minelli (1978) and Debbie Hairy (1980), the dramatic effect produced in these silkscreen portraits resemble an obliteration of features of these famous faces, rather than an increase in contrasts, with only their hairstyles distinguishing the faces. In addition to the eyes and lips, the faces are marked by an overwhelming whiteness. In creating celebrity portraits, Warhol drew attention to the construed, anonymous identity of all and showed that celebrity is merely an endless proliferation of sameness.

It has been argued however that Warhol’s constructed-ness of celebrity does not necessarily suggest that anyone can be famous or become identical to the stars, under Warhol’s hands such as with his Ladies and Gentlemen portfolio. If Warhol’s portraiture were to be treated as “giving face” then this would imply the recognisability of an individual. This is hardly possible as Warhol’s portraiture of the ladies and gentlemen pictured have no proper names, and thus have little hope of attaining fame. In the absence of specific names, unlike stars who are known to the public, the other sitters of Warhol remain nobodies by the absence of specific names (Cooke 30). Their anonymity is entirely different than the anonymous identity of all the stars portrayed in Warhol’s works.

The role of apparently absent visual pleasure is that these visuals – paintings or pictures – allow them to be whatever you want them to be. Warhol’s Rorschach paintings (1984) for instance, look liquid, protean, and vacant, yet they have been described as reflecting each viewer’s desires and fantasies. They merely thus appear to be absent of any visual pleasure. It is however this apparent absence that leaves room for the spectator’s interpretation, and from such interpretation, the spectator can derive his or her visual pleasure without the headache of trying to figure out what the artist intended. These visual pleasures may not always indicate apparent visual pleasure, but hold some implied pleasures available to the spectator.

Works Cited

Carson, John. “Artforum-ism, or the Mythical Andy Warhol.” Eastern Illinois University. 2007.

Cooke, Lynne. “Andy Warhol.” DIA Art Foundation, 2008. Web.

Cutrone, Ray. “Interview with Patrick Smith”. Warhol: Conversations About the Artist. Ann Arbor; London: 1988.

Flatley, James. Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia. Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Andy Warhol is sometimes called the Prince of pop art. I would refer to him as a maestro King of Pop art. His works have made a significant appearance in media. This can be attributed to the aesthetic emotions evoked from his artwork. The emotions are a result of the magnificent fresh colors he employs in his work. That is a fine composition that contains vivid extrinsic and extrinsic features that is thought-provoking. Well, one of his best artworks is “Marilyn Diptych”. This is an illustration of a notable personality during his time. Most of Andy’s paintings have a historical allusion that represents what affects our day-to-day lives. This is a foremost aspect that makes his pop art meaningful to the media industry of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. His art postulates the ambiguities experienced in his life as a middle-social class worker.

In this painting “Marilyn Diptych” he exposes the beauty and the enigmatic statue of Marilyn as a beautiful adored Goddess. However, the mystery behind her suicide is unsolved but Andy has cremated her in perfect art that shows her face and head. Maybe this was a depiction of her mental illness that she sometimes developed! When Marilyn died in August 1962, Andy could not wait to depict her in 50 repetitive images that emphasize her enigmatic beauty and stature. In fact, the color composition pays for the whole artwork! This silkscreen painting on canvas may make one notice the historic and social context in terms of lifestyle and democracy. This type of art carries the characteristics of Postmodernism art. There is a mixed form of parody and irony in the painting which evokes aesthetic emotions.

“Marilyn Diptych” is a multicolored silk work that mimics the all-encompassing culture and a personality that was most revered. This piece of art makes one be involved because of its size and the mind-numbing repetitive images. The density in hue decrease when your eyes move from left to right. The right part of the painting seems fragile and ill. From a first look, the color is sickening yet beckoning with its depth variation. His choice of 50 repetitive images was to conform to the idea of balance. From a general worm’s point of view, the audience can see the bottom line of the silk-screening is dull painted. On the left part of the painting, the images are generously painted in a vivid hue. This represents the enigmatic and jubilant lifestyle Marilyn lived. The middle image gives ambiguity and erroneous artistic features when he tries to make her blurred. Essentially, this explains the mental disturbances she encountered in her life before committing suicide. The far-right images are fragile and faintly hued in calming darkness that suggests loss of enthusiasm in life, hence, a reflection of her demise. The repetitive nature of the images in the portrait and imposed face shows the stages in life that a person ensues. The color composition brings forth the extrinsic and intrinsic features characteristic of his pop art artistic style. Therefore, Andy’s artistic brush in depicting Diptych gives the self-identity in the beauty that eventually fades when it is repeated. The qualities in the celebrity are shown in the happy face and degraded at some point in the painting by color density. Therefore, my eyes could decipher that the juxtaposition evident in the piece gives the difference between life and mortality of Marilyn (Gardner 1054).

Most of his art qualifies as a social commentary up-to-date. Most of his art was commercialized and earned a social place. The beginning of his artistic genius was when a friend socially suggested that he should resort to painting what he really loved. Amazingly, this created pop art that has been the focus of media and made has him a celebrity. While in his company called “The Factory”, he socially interacted with society by producing perfect art that met society’s demand in genres like; films, drawings, sculptures, and erotic photographs. His social collaboration with other artists makes his depiction of the American culture significant and perfectly reflected. His technique was a profound inspiration to industries in making replicas of items that are useful but still maintain the quality, e.g., the dollar. Although one can say that his artwork was career-oriented but evidently from the above argument, the art he displayed served his best interest and not merely commercial.

Other notable examples of Andy Warhol’s works are the “Campbell’s soup cans” that he designed. He made an economic and social significance to America. Another piece of Warhol’s paintings that used imagery was the sensitive drawings of the shoes that were commercialized (Bourdon 51). This was his debut in the commercial scene. The second most famous sculpture was the silkscreened imagery replicas of Soap. The series was made of wood. Lastly, the most imagery and repetitive works made by Andy were the Silver Cloud balloons that were used in exhibitions (Warhol 21).

Works Cited

Bourdon, David. Warhol. New York City: Harry N. Abrams, 1989 Print.

Gardner, Helen, et al. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. New York, NY: Thompson Wadsworth, 2004. Print.

Warhol, Andy and Pat, Hacket. POPism: The Warhol ’60s. New York City, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Print.