Andy Warhol

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
― Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was a painter, film maker and print maker born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Warhol attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he received formal training in pictorial design. In 1949, he began working as a commercial illustrator, doing projects with magazines such as Glamour, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker.

Warhol Began painting in the late 1950s. With a fascination with commercialism and pop culture, he exhibited paintings featuring Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo pad replicas. He also began making silk screen prints of celebrities in garish colours. These works put Warhol at the forefront of the Pop art movement in America.

Pop art was a movement that emerged in the late 1950s that challenged the traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, packaging, comic books, celebrities and mundane cultural objects.

In 1964, Warhol opened his own art studio, a large silver-painted warehouse known simply as “The Factory.” The Factory quickly became one of New York City’s premier cultural hotspots, a scene of lavish parties attended by the city’s wealthiest socialites and celebrities

With the progression of the 60s, Warhol began to explore filmmaking. Some of his most famous films include Sleep, which depicts poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours, and Eat, which shows a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes. Warhol also explored television, photography and sculpture within his career.

Gallery

Though Campbell’s Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which Warhol was inspired, its canvases are hand-painted, and the pattern ringing each can’s bottom edge is hand-stamped. Warhol mimicked the repetition and uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety. Warhol repeatedly ate Campbell’s soup for lunch repeatedly for 20 years.

32 Campbell’s Soup Cans 1962 – Andy Warhol

For Warhol, Marilyn was already a familiar subject. He initially began depicting the actress in the Marilyn Diptych, 1962, shortly after her death. Monroe is a pop culture icon. Warhol’s depictions of women and starlets of the time explored the relationships between consumer society, fashion, fame, sensationalism and death. It is also said that through his distinctive style of work, Warhol referred to a society in which individuals were seen as mere products rather than human beings.

Inspired works

Takashi Murakami

Often referred to as Japan’s response to Andy Warhol, Murakami is also know for blurring the line between commercial and fine art.

Gianni Versace’s SS91 Pop Art collection featured a jewel-encrusted dress emblazoned with Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints, worn by supermodel Linda Evangelista. Both glamourous and sexy, the dress defined 90s fashion and as one of Versace’s most celebrated creations is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.