Andy Warhol
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Andy Warhol, the high priest of Pop Art, presented everyday images,
from soup cans to celebrity photos, as high art, in repetitious
silk-screen reproductions. His preoccupation with the popular led to
his famed remark that "in the future everybody will be world famous
for fifteen minutes".
Warhol was born in Newport, Rhode Island, of Czechoslovakian
parents. He grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated in 1949 with a degree
in Fine Arts and Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute and
began a career as a commercial artist in New York City until 1962 when
he pioneered his mechanical screen-printing style.
He soon became king of the art underground, churning out paintings
from his East 47th Street studio, known as "The Factory". This was the
era of giant Campbell's soup cans and replicas of Brillo cartoons,
silk screen prints of Marilyn Monroe, gangster broads, accidents, and
balloons filled with helium and painted silver. And then in 1963 he
turned his eye to a movie camera and gathered eccentric, beautiful
characters such as Edie Sedgwick, Ultra Violet, Joe Dallesandro, Holly
Woodlawn, and the Velvet Underground to star in his avant-garde films.
 His first film was Tarzan and Jane Revisited . . . Sort Of.
Taylor Mead, a famous poet of the underground, took the part of Tarzan
in this parody of the famous series. Then came Sleep, filmed
over a period of six weeks with a static camera. When all the shots
were joined together Warhol had a six-hour film of a man asleep. As
the 60s wore on, Warhol introduced sound and began to distribute
films such as Bike Boy, Lonesome Cowboys, Flesh, Trash and
Heat.
Joe D'Allesandro was the most famous face to emerge from the
underground and was a mainstay of the Warhol repertory company,
appearing in three Warhol films which resulted in widely publicized
censorship battles; Flesh, Trash and Heat.
By the 1980s Andy Warhol was a mainstream figure, painting society
portraits and flattering the famous. However, shortly before his
death, his artistic work was rejuvenated by association with young New
York graffiti artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat. |
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