Warhol, Andy (redirected from Andy Warhol)

Warhol, Andy, 1928–87, American artist and filmmaker, b. Pittsburgh as Andrew Warhola. The leading exponent of the pop art movement and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th cent., 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. 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. He and his assistants worked out of a large New York studio dubbed the "Factory." In the mid-1960s Warhol began making films, suppressing the personal element in marathon essays on boredom. 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. Among his later films are Trash (1971) and L'Amour (1973). With Paul Morrissey, Warhol also made the films Frankenstein and Dracula (both: 1974). In 1973, Warhol launched the magazine Interview, a publication centered upon his fascination with the cult of the celebrity. He died from complications following surgery. The Andy Warhol Museum, which exhibits many of his works, opened in Pittsburgh in 1994.

Bibliography

See his autobiographies (1969 and 1971); K. Goldsmith, ed., I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962–1987 (2004); C. Ratcliff, Andy Warhol (1983); D. Bourdon, Warhol (1989); V. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol (1989); W. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (2001); S. Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (2004).

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Warhol, Andy

 orig. Andrew Warhola

(born Aug. 6, 1928?, Pittsburgh?, Pa., U.S.—died Feb. 22, 1987, New York, N.Y.) U.S. artist and filmmaker. The son of Czech immigrants, Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, in 1949. He then went to New York City, where he worked as a commercial illustrator. Warhol began painting in the late 1950s and received sudden notoriety in 1962, when he exhibited paintings of Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap-pad boxes. By 1963 he was mass-producing these purposely banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic silk screen prints; he then began printing endless variations of portraits of celebrities in garish colours. The silk screen technique was ideally suited to Warhol, for the repeated image was reduced to a dehumanized cultural icon that reflected both the supposed emptiness of American material culture and the artist's emotional distance from the practice of his art. Warhol's work placed him in the forefront of the emerging Pop art movement in the United States. As the 1960s progressed, Warhol devoted more of his energy to filmmaking. His “underground” films are known for their inventive eroticism, plotless boredom, and inordinate length (up to 25 hours). Throughout the 1970s and until his death he continued to produce prints depicting political and Hollywood celebrities, and he involved himself in a wide range of advertising illustrations and other commercial art projects. He was one of the most famous and important American cultural figures of the late 20th century, and the effects of his conceptions of art and celebrity continue to be felt.

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Warhol, Andy (b. Andrew Warhola) (1928–87) painter, filmmaker; born in Pittsburgh, Pa. A founder of the pop art movement of the 1960s, he studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh (1945–49) and by 1950 had settled in New York City working as a commercial artist. By 1957 he began his series of silkscreen paintings based on comic strips, advertisements, and newspaper photos of public personalities; by 1961 his painted replicas of Campbell's Soup cans made him into a celebrity, and from then on his works and words ("In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.") kept him constantly in the headlines although he cultivated an image that was both elusive and evasive. Much of his work was collaborative and produced in a loft called "the Factory." He also turned to making underground films such as Chelsea Girls (1966), deliberately coarse amalgams of sexuality and banality; these were coproduced and primarily directed by Paul Morrissey. In 1968 Warhol was shot and wounded by Valerie Solanis, who had appeared in his films. In 1969 he began to publish Interview, a magazine of fashion news and gossip. He then embarked on his serial portraits of international personalities, becoming extremely rich from selling silkscreen multiples of such as Mao Zedong (1974). He amassed a fabulous collection of antiques and collectibles (such as cookie jars), auctioned after his death for a small fortune. Said to have been a devout Catholic, he remained personally enigmatic despite his years in the public spotlight.