MacFormat 1996 July

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ MacFormat 1996 July / macformat-039.iso / DATABASE / SHARED.DIR / 01535_180.cap.txt < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1996-03-14 | 4.3 KB | 272 lines

@ Notoriously evasive about his early life, Warhol regularly varied the date and place of his birth. The son of Czech immigrants, Andy Warhol, remembered only the "babushkas and overalls on the clothes line" of his childhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1949 he left for New York # Warhol's New York studio was always called "The Factory", reflecting the industrial scale of silkscreen production. By 1964 his famous Factory studio on East 47th became the place to be seen in New York. A casualty of the intense Factory life was New York socialite Edie Sedgwick, who died of a drugs overdose in 1971 # Valeria Solanas, who shot and wounded Warhol, was a founder member of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men. The incident added to Warhol's notoreity, and he transformed it into part of his artistic biography when he had his bullet scars photographed by Richard Avedon # Warhol was almost wilfully inarticulate "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me and there I am. There's nothing behind it." # Always an astute self-publicist Warhol become a one-man promo- tional industry, the main attraction in his own travelling circus # Warhol himself led a restrained life. After the turbulent Sixties he emerged in the Seventies and Eighties as America's most famous living artist. The freaks who populated the factory in the early days now gave way to the global jet-set @ Warhol graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 to become an illustrator at Glamour magazine. He was soon one of the most successful commercial artists in New York, but he also produced his own work, including privately printed books # Warhol began to focus on painting, initially advertising and comic strips and then images of everyday 'icons' of pop culture - famous faces, Campbell's soup tins, dollar bills, Coca Cola bottles # Warhol's fascination with stardom led to a series of multiple portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy. The mechanical nature of the photoscreen process reduced the personal role of the artist and many were produced by a team at the Factory studio # In 1965 Warhol decided to concentrate on film-making, holding a 'farewell' exhibition as a "retired artist" in 1966. "Art just wasn't for me any more; it was people who were fascinating." # Warhol's silkscreen images of Mao in 1972 marked his renewed interest in painting, which included highly- stylised and highly profitable commissioned 'vanity portraits'. He continued to produce new paintings - notably a series of self portraits @ Pop Art emerged after the war, drawing its imagery from popular culture. Warhol had long admired Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and their paintings of familiar images like the American flag. Along with Roy Lichtenstein and sculptor Claes Oldenberg, Warhol became the most renowned American pop artist of the Sixties # Some thought that Warhol's meticulous reproduction of consumer images was too close to the original and too far removed from existing ideas of painting to be art. "I find his images offensive," said one critic, "I am annoyed to have to see in a gallery what I am forced to look at in the supermarket." # Making the ordinary seem extraordinary proved to be highly lucrative. The raging success of Sixties Pop Art was repeated in the Eighties when prices soared again. In 1989, Warhol's Shot Red Marilyn, a silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe, sold for 4.07 million dollars # American Pop Art reacted against the obscure abstracts of artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Roy Lichtenstein commented: "Art has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art, it is utopian, it has less and less to do with the world, it looks inward." # Warhol once said that "art should be for everyone". His egalitarian approach also extended to fame: "In the future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes," he said # Pop art was intended to put a bomb under mainstream American culture, but succeeded only in becoming part of the mainstream. An acknowledgement of Warhol's respectability came in 1994 with the opening of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh