Andy Warhol 1928 —1987

Warhol passively let the world focus on his high-profile pop persona while maintaining a private side that very few knew.

He founded, with Gerard Malanga, Interview magazine, and published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975). An idea expressed in the book: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."

In May, 1999, ARTNews magazine named him one of the twenty-five most influential artists-ever.  About him, it was written: . . . "it all began with the first Campbell's soup can in 1962. . . With this simple image, the concepts of appropriation and commidification were let loose for good. Warhol's celebration of his screen sirens, hustler hunks, and cafe-society wanna-bees . . .had an equally dramatic effect."

Andy Warhol, American painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator, film maker, writer and collector. After studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1945 to 1949 he moved to New York City in 1949 and began a successful career in magazine illustration and advertising. During the 1950s, he gained fame for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements. These were done in a loose, blotted-ink style, and figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York.   A campaign of advertisements for the shoe manufacturers I. Miller & Sons in 1955–6 (Kornbluth, pp. 113–21) was particularly admired, helping to earn him major awards from the Art Directors Club.

His first one-man art-gallery exhibition as a fine artist was on July 9, 1962, in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles. The exhibition marked the West Coast debut of pop art. Andy Warhol's first New York solo Pop exhibit was hosted at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery November 6–24, 1962. The exhibit included the works Marilyn Diptych, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles and 100 Dollar Bills. At the Stable Gallery exhibit, the artist met for the first time John Giorno who would star in Warhol's first film, Sleep, in 1963.^{[citation needed]}

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory", his studio during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities. He began producing prints using the silkscreen method. His work became popular and controversial.  New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. 

Warhol continued to support himself through his commercial work until at least 1963, but from 1960 he determined to establish his name as a painter. Motivated by a desire to be taken as seriously as the young artists whose work he had recently come to know and admire, especially Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he began by painting a series of pictures based on crude advertisements and on images from comic strips. These are among the earliest examples of Pop Art. The first such works, for example Water Heater (1960; New York, MOMA) and Saturday’s Popeye (1960; Mainz, Landesmus.), were loosely painted in a mock-expressive style that parodied the gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. Those that followed, however, such as Before and After 3 (1962; New York, Whitney), one of several paintings based on advertisements for plastic surgery, were phrased in a deliberately inexpressive style of painting characterized by hard outlines and flat areas of colour.

In their calculated exclusion of all conventional signs of personality, in their apparent rejection of invention and in their blatant vulgarity these first Pop works were brutal and shocking, designed to offend the sensibilities of an audience accustomed to thinking of art as an intimate medium for conveying emotion. Warhol extended these concerns through techniques that gave his images a printed appearance, including the use of stencils, rubber stamps and hand-cut silkscreens, and in his choice of subject-matter. He was drawn to the shocking images of tabloid newspapers, as in 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash) , to money (in a series of screenprinted paintings representing rows of dollar bills) and to the denigrated products of consumer society, including Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Campbell’s Soup (e.g. One Hundred Cans, 1962; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.).

From autumn 1962 Warhol’s paintings were made almost exclusively by screenprinting photographic images on to backgrounds painted either in a single colour or in flat interlocking areas that corresponded approximately to the contours of the superimposed images. In these works, executed with the help of assistants in the studio that he called The Factory, he succeeded in removing his hand even more decisively from the canvas and in challenging the concept of the unique art work by repeating the same mechanically produced image until it appeared to be drained of all meaning. Among the most successful of these were portraits of glamorous film stars such as the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe, whose masklike face acquires an iconic quality in works such as Marilyn Diptych (for illustration see Pop Art), and gruesome images of car crashes and other daily disasters as seen in photographs reproduced in mass-circulation newspapers, such as Green Disaster Ten Times (1963; Frankfurt am Main, Mus. Mod. Kst). A pivotal event was the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket, a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical U.S. small supermarket environment, except that everything in it – from the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc. – was created by six prominent pop artists of the time, among them the controversial (and like-minded) Billy Apple, Mary Inman, and Robert Watts. Warhol's painting of a can of Campbell's soup cost $1,500 while each autographed can sold for $6. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what art is (or of what is art and what is not).   He also applied these ideas about art based on mass production in a witty installation of sculptures at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964, replicating supermarket cartons to their actual size by screenprinting their designs on to blocks made of plywood (e.g. Brillo Boxes, 1964; Cologne, Mus. Ludwig).

During a visit to Paris for an exhibition of his work in 1965, Warhol announced his intention to retire from painting in order to devote himself to the experimental films that he had begun making in 1963. Although he continued to paint and contributed significantly to the growing interest in limited edition prints through works such as the Marilyn portfolio of ten screenprints published in 1967 (Feldman and Schellmann, p. 39), he became increasingly involved with other media. Films such as Empire (black and white, 8 hours long, 1964), an unbearably prolonged shot of the Empire State Building against a darkening sky, presented his aesthetic of boredom in its most extreme and provocative form. His multi-media events under the banner of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which combined the live music of The Velvet Underground rock band with projections of film and light, subjected the audience to a sensory experience that combined the energy of popular culture with the concerns of performance art.

Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity. Collaboration would remain a defining (and controversial) aspect of his working methods throughout his career; in the 1960s, however, this was particularly true. One of the most important collaborators during this period was Gerard Malanga. Malanga assisted the artist with producing silkscreens, films, sculpture, and other works at "The Factory", Warhol's aluminum foil-and-silver-paint-lined studio on 47th Street (later moved to Broadway). Other members of Warhol's Factory crowd included Freddie Herko, Ondine, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov, Billy Name, and Brigid Berlin (from whom he apparently got the idea to tape-record his phone conversations).

During the '60s, Warhol also groomed a retinue of bohemian eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "Superstars", including Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ultra Violet, and Candy Darling. These people all participated in the Factory films, and some – like Berlin – remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world, such as writer John Giorno and film-maker Jack Smith, also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this time.

After an attempt on his life in 1968, Warhol distanced himself from the drug addicts, transvestites and other unconventional types who had formed his entourage and became associated primarily with the wealthy and fashionable members of high society.  After the shooting, the Factory scene became much more tightly controlled, and for many this event brought the "Factory 60s" to an end. The shooting was mostly overshadowed in the media due to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two days later.

Warhol had this to say about the attack: "Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television."

 With the exception of particular series such as his portraits of Mao Zedong (e.g. Mao, 4.44×3.47 m, 1973; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.), a topical subject chosen at the time of President Nixon’s visit to China, he concentrated in the 1970s primarily on commissioned portraits printed from enlargements of Polaroid photographs. Deprived of the glamour of an immediately recognizable public figure, these frankly commercial works, such as Jane Lang (1976; Seattle, WA, A. Mus.), were seen by many as the mark of his artistic decline, although the income they generated enabled Warhol to celebrate his final self-declared transformation from commercial artist to business artist. 

Warhol used to socialize at various nightspots in New York City, including Max's Kansas City; and, later in the '70s, Studio 54. He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and a meticulous observer. Art critic Robert Hughes called him "the white mole of Union Square."

Among the most striking works of Warhol’s prolific later production are a series of 102 Shadows (each 1.93×1.32 m, 1979; New York, Dia A. Found.), all screenprinted from a vastly enlarged photograph of a shadow cast by a painting in his studio, which were exhibited edge-to-edge as an installation that completely surrounded the viewer’s field of vision. His Oxidation Paintings of the late 1970s (e.g. see MOMA exh. cat., pp. 350–51), made by urinating on a surface of copper paint, were equally experimental and came close to pure abstraction; seductively beautiful in their metallic sheen, they, too, contain an element of savage parody in their reinterpretation of the principles of ‘all-over’ composition ascribed to the paintings of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock.

Warhol’s work regained much of its lost spirit in the 1980s, thanks in part to the support of younger artists indebted to his example. After producing a group of collaborative paintings with Francesco Clemente and the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88), he returned for the first time since the early 1960s to painting by hand. His last works included several hand-painted pictures on religious themes after Renaissance masters, such as the Last Supper (acrylic on canvas, 3.02×6.68 m, 1986; artist’s estate, see MOMA exh. cat., p. 395), in which a version in outline of Leonardo’s enduring interpretation of one of Christianity’s most sacred events is partly obliterated by grossly enlarged logos of brand names. It is a fittingly ambiguous testament to an artist who was a devout Catholic but who maintained an equally strong reverence for the capitalist system that was so central to his subject-matter. He died as a result of complications following a routine gall-bladder operation. A service attended by more than 2000 people was held in his memory at St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York.

Andy Warhol's will dictated that his entire estate – with the exception of a few modest legacies to family members – would go to create a foundation dedicated to the "advancement of the visual arts". Warhol had so many possessions that it took Sotheby’s nine days to auction his estate after his death; the auction grossed more than US$20 million. Warhol was remembered by friends and associates as a compulsive shopper. The bulk of his extensive collection, which contained only a small amount of contemporary art amongst a great deal of jewelry and decorative art (especially Art Nouveau and Art Deco), Native American art and American folk art, was auctioned a year after his death.  His total estate was worth considerably more than the $20 million realized at auction, due in no small part to the sheer value of his art and has continued to grow.  The Andy Warhol Foundation released its 20th Anniversary Annual Report as a three-volume set in 2007: Vol. I, 1987–2007; Vol. II, Grants & Exhibitions; and Vol. III, Legacy Program. in accordance with Warhol's will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was founded. The Foundation not only serves as the official Estate of Andy Warhol, but also has a mission "to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process" and is "focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature."  The Foundation is one of the largest grant-giving organizations for the visual arts in the U.S.

His published writings, characterized by the same tone of dead-pan naivety as his work, contain some of the most revealing insights into the attitudes that moulded his art. The Andy Warhol Museum, housing a large collection of his works from all periods drawn in large part from his estate, was inaugurated in Pittsburgh in May 1994.

An important source for modern and contemporary American & European Art in East Hampton, New York & worldwide, Vered Gallery's spectacular wide-ranging inventory consists of unique paintings, drawings, large & small scale sculpture, monotypes, prints and photographs  by Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Richard Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Fernando Botero, Cartier-Bresson, Marc Chagall, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Winslow Homer, Wolf Kahn, Jeff Koons, Fernand Leger, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Thomas Moran, Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Bert Stern, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, Carleton E Watkins, Tom Wesselmann and Andrew Wyeth.

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