Pop artist Andy Warhol famously elevated everyday objects – like soup cans – to works of fine art. His paintings, silkscreens and photography often focused on American consumerism, not just of products, but of celebrities and images themselves. This program will look at the abbreviated life, artwork and enduring legacy of the artist who predicted “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” Image: Andy Warhol, Campbell Soup Cans, 1960s.
About the Presenter:
Jane Oneail holds a master’s in Art History from Boston University and a master’s in Education from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She is a NH native and has worked at some of the state’s most esteemed cultural institutions, including the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, where she served as Executive Director, and the Currier Museum of Art, where she held the role of Senior Educator. Jane founded the Currier’s Alzheimer’s Cafe and led the tour program for the museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Zimmerman House. She has taught Art History at the college level for more than a decade, most recently at the NH Institute of Art.
Culturally Curious’s mission is to engage, educate and unify groups through facilitated arts experiences that inspire joy and foster critical and creative thinking, as well as an appreciation for our shared humanity.
Hello folks and welcome we’re going to give everyone just a moment to log into Zoom tonight for our program before we get started all right so while folks are still trickling in I am going to do just a brief introduction um hello everyone welcome my name is Gian I’m one of the
Reference Librarians here at the Chelmsford public library and again thank you all for joining us for tonight’s art on Thursday presents Andy warhol’s 15 minutes of fame pop artist Andy Warhol famously elevated everyday objects like Soup cans to works of Fine Art his paintings silk screens and photography often focused on American
Consumerism not just of products but of celebrities and images themselves this program will look at the abbreviated life artwork and enduring Legacy of the artist to predicted in the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes so to pass it on over to Jane our presenter so Jane O’Neal holds a
MERS in art history from Boston University and a master’s in education from the Harvard University graduate school of education she is a New Hampshire native and has worked at some of the state’s most esteemed cultural institutions including the league of New Hampshire Craftsman where she served as executive director and The Courier
Museum of Art where she held the role of senior educator Jane founded The Courier Alzheimer’s Cafe and led the tour program for the museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Zimmerman house she has taught art history at the college level for more than a decade most recently at New Hampshire Institute
Of Art and if you’re more curious about Jan’s programs um and more about her um please visit I am culturally curious.com I’ll make sure to put that in the chat any questions for tonight’s program also throw those in the chat or the Q&A section at the bottom of your Zoom menu
Down there and we can get to those at the end of the presentation so without further ado I’m going to pass it on over to Jane thank you so much GA and thank you everybody for joining us tonight I’m always I just feel so privileged to have
Your time and attention so thank you for being here it’s such a pleasure for me to put together these programs and to share them with you and tonight we’re in for such a treat I know I say that every month don’t I but tonight we really are
In for a treat because Andy Warhol is was the king of the pop art movement he is a cultural icon he was one of the most important artists of the 20th century if not the most important it’s sort of him and Pablo Picasso so he was an artist who explored the relationships
Between artistic expression celebrity culture advertising and his own identity as an openly gay man before the Gay Liberation movement so there is so much to talk about when it comes to Andy Warhol um we could spend weeks on him but we’re I’ve tried to cram as much
Good information into uh this one hour that we have together so let me give you a sense in terms of how we’ll spend this hour together we will be getting back to this lovely lady on the screen in just a little while but um here we have the
Artist himself standing in front of one of his silk screens and I’ve sort of given our sections here uh fun little titles that refer to the way Andy Warhol worked so uh he would start off with a template before making a lot of his work and in this case his template is really
His early years so we’ll talk about how that sort of got um his interests and um and his his Focus uh to sort of come together in the first couple decades of his life then we’ll talk about how he launches himself his career his art his artwork in the commercial world how he
Turns to branding when it comes to the world of Fine Art and how he begins to Brand himself and then he BR brings production to scale essentially and and opens the factory his continuing fascination with celebrity and then later death and then we will finish up
With his legacy like I said so much to cover here so let’s Dive Right into to the template his early years in this case Andy Warhol was B born Andrew warhola he was born in 1928 and he grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania he was the youngest son from Slovakian immigrant
Parents um he had two old Brothers if I’m remembering correctly but this is him probably around the age of of three or four uh sitting on his mother’s lap here now his fa his his parents were very devout and they would actually attend Catholic mass several times a
Week at a Byzantine Catholic Church in the neighborhood and this is the actual altar of that church so you can imagine what an impression this space made on young Andrew warhall uh sitting in the space for hours at a time every week absorbing the colors the format of these
Of these painted Saints and all of these icons here so uh this will certainly have an impact on his work later on now as a young man we can see him here probably as an early teen and then around the age of 18 over on the right
As a young man he had uh several struggles that he had to deal with one of them was the fact that he had Coria which is also known as st vitus’s Dance it’s a neurological disorder which basically means like sometimes your limbs kind of flail um um involuntarily
And sometimes it means that you can have kind of like discoloration uh and um on your face so he was actually kind of teased and bullied over this I believe he um the little kids called him Andy the red-nosed warh Hala so Cory kept him
Out of schools uh for months at a time and that was a a chance for him to really connect with his mother she would buy him movie mag azines where he would read all about the celebrities and he would play with paper cutouts his parents very much supported his interest
In the Arts even though Hy was growing up in the Great Depression by the time he was 13 years old they had um bought him a camera so that he could continue exploring this interest now unfortunately his father died in an accident when he was just a young
Teenager but um that only served to really cement the strong relationship that he had with his mother the image that we see over here on the right was taken by one of his brothers on the day before he uh started college in 1945 it he went to what is now carneg
Melon University um in right there in Pittsburgh and when he went to school he went to study essentially Commercial Art I believe his major was um oh it was just that commercial art and he served as the art director for the student magazine so we’re just looking at two
Examples of his student work and I wanted to share them with you because it shows us that at this young age he’s been exposed to European modernism he is showing us this kind of flattened somewhat flattened perspective in the Interior Space over here on the left this interest in um in in certainly
Flattened figures here and and and patterning sort of reminds me of the fact that he was doing paper cutouts as a little boy he was also very interested in dance incidentally while he was at school so um he earns his Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949
And he is ready to Take On The World this is his launch actually he boldly decides I’m going to move to New York City and pursue a career as a commercial artist and good for young Andrew warhall because he um got a gig almost instantly for Glamour magazine this is his
Illustration um for a a a um an article approp rately titled success is a job in New York he’s like illustrating his life in some ways but he’s shown us this fancy young lady who has climbed the ladder is perched high above the city and is kind of triumphantly smoking her
Little cigarette there so we already get a sense that he can create these Modern Images these Charming somewhat Whimsical images and this uh sort of becomes characteristic of his style while he’s working this is a a sort of later illust tion that he did but it shows that um
Even in his illustrations he’s certainly happy to integrate the actual logos and um and particular fonts of of specific products that he likes so um we’ll see that translates very much to his his work as a fine art artist as well but in terms of his commercial work and he did
Do commercial work in um in New York City for really the better part of the 1950s so uh when we’re thinking about his work at this time one of the things that he becomes uh particularly well known for is What’s called the blotted line ink drawing and this is a great
Example of what he was doing and this is something that you could easily do at your own home if you have maybe some photo paper or some very shiny paper essentially he he does an ink drawing on that shiny paper so the that paper resists the ink and it’s sort of resting
On the surface and then he presses that shiny paper into a regular sheet of paper which absorbs that ink it is a very rudimentary form of print making and it gives us this really uneven um again sort of a Whimsical line here especially if you’re illustrating a
Unicorn for example over here and this became a a very popular style at the time and he like I said he really mastered it he was also pretty well known for illustrating or drawing shoes he worked very closely with a shoe designer named is Israel Miller and he
Just he loved to do these shoes and and Israel Miller loved what what Andy Warhol produced for him too he said uh the bow was always in just the right place now apparently Andy Warhol um felt so confident about these shoes that he was making that he apparently sent one
Of his shoe drawings off to the Museum of Modern Art we don’t know exactly which shoe drawing but it could look a lot like this uh blotted ink line drawing that we see over here on the left and here in 1956 well we see the rejection letter here he was so
Confident in his work as a young man still in his 20s he submits a work for consideration to enter into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and they say h no thanks I’m sure they’re sort of kicking themselves over that one but we see at this sort of
Fairly uh early stage in this young man’s life he is thinking about making the leap from Commercial Art to Fine Art and so it’s not not um it’s not a One-Shot deal for him he he has to kind of struggle to break into that world now
He has um some added support in his life because just a few years after he moves to New York City his mother Julia ends up moving with him moving in with him I should say so they’re sharing an apartment and apparently they shared this apartment with 25 cats now um it’s
Really hard for me to imagine living with 25 cats in New York City but um but mother was also an artist in her own right and so one of the things that Andy Warhol was doing as a young man in his 20 to kind of make a name for himself
And probably make a few extra dollars was he was uh self-publishing these little art books and this is one about cats I believe his mother did um did uh did the writing in these books and you can see these are handcolored books that they were creating which sort of added
The value to them and Andy Warhol did something really smart when it came to the hand coloring of these books you know to do it all would be so much work so what he did was he assembled his friends at this now very famous cafe called serendipity3 in New York City and
He basically had his friends doing the hand coloring in almost like um a factory setting you know um so you just go down this Factory line and one friend would color this cat the next friend would color the next and it’s so fascinating for me to think of him
Creating a factory out of his friends so early on in his career it’s also really interesting to consider too that this Cafe was frequented by celebrities including Marilyn Monroe who we know becomes a a pretty Central to to Andy’s focus in not too short a time now I’ve
Been referring to him as Andrew Andy or Andrew bhalla this whole time um that was the way he presented himself to the world uh it really wasn’t until he kind of uh carved out a niche for himself in near New York City that he dropped that
Last a in his name so he just becomes Andy Warhol but really at this time he was known as Raggedy Andy he would walk around the street the the city in this kind of frumpled suit with a little bow tie and the glasses and he would go from
Like Editor to editor and and submit his work or solicit um opportunities now even though he was finding the success uh there are all sorts of wonderfully embarrassing stories about him at this stage of his career too he told one that included uh where he went to go meet with an editor
And he took out this little leather portfolio that he had to show examples of his work he unzips it and apparently a cockroach uh came came walking out of his portfolio he said that the editor took pity on him and offered him a job from there so like I said he was doing
Well for himself but he longed for something else and now I mentioned at the start of the program that he was openly gay and so uh as he’s thinking about breaking into the world of Fine Art one of his first foray into doing that besides submitting work to the
Museum of Modern Art was uh he presented a a solo exhibition in 1956 so that same year that he submitted his drawing and this solo exhibition was called studies for a Boy book and essentially they were Sketchbook drawings of sort of homoerotic Sketchbook drawings of young
Men and um and a lot of them were male nudes now this is the middle of the 19 50s in um in New York City think uh Madmen right it it wasn’t really uh well the world wasn’t really prepared for what Andy Warhol was offering and if we
Think about what was happening in the art world at this time you have abstract expressionism we’re just coming off the heels of Jackson poock like throwing and splattering paint and and presenting himself as this intense Macho Man this cowboy and then Along Comes Andy Warhol who seems so effeminate he’s the
Opposite of of so many of of these abstract expressionists who uh seemed really powerful and visceral in so many ways so the world just wasn’t quite ready for sweet Andy Warhol yet so that’s why we turn our attention to branding and this is really uh well this
Becomes a major Focus for him and it changes the way he engages with u commercial illustration and the world of Fine Art thinking about branding uh revolutionizes everything and this is really where pop art begins now most people think of Andy moral when they think of pop art but he did not start
The movement it actually started over in Britain but he is synonymous with it because he really had um this uh well this way of of bringing together the ideas of um of using logos and symbols from um from some from mass media from popular culture and integrating them
Into his work so we’re looking at two three examples of of his work around the subject of cocacola and these were done just between the years of 1961 and 1962 so we can see a big difference in terms of how he’s approaching this subject uh this evolves very quickly over a short
Time so um in terms of Coca-Cola why would you choose Coca-Cola uh he loved the idea that coca colola was the same no matter where you got it and no matter who you were if you were the president you’d be drinking the same kind of coke
As like you know a homeless person on the street so um that uniformity is something that he really appreciated so as he begins to think about uh uh sort of combining commercial illustration and art we can see that he has painted a Coca-Cola bottle and there’s all of this
Evidence of the artist’s hand here and there’s uh quite a bit of of expressive sort of gesture in his painting here and he even obscures the label the the the logo to a certain extent we very much see and understand that this is an artist sort of playing with and
Considering um the subject of Coca-Cola but then he turns this all around he creates this six foot tall painting of um practically the same subject and and now it looks like a commercial illustration the evidence of the artist’s hand is completely gone and of course this level of Polish this level
Of finish is something that artists have have aspired to for um for centuries but usually not for commercial purposes so um so he’s kind of turning himself into a machine here again and then he takes it one step further by using the silk screen process to create these stacked
Coca-Cola bottles which almost look like something that you’d see in the freezer or in the refrigerator at a grocery store or something that you’d see printed on cheap tabloid newspaper and so some of these Coca-Cola bottles are you know they’re not printed uh entirely they are um they’re slightly obscured
But they’re still they’re still discernable here so he’s kind of playing with the very notion of the ubiquity of this product and how recognizable it is and of course these are themes that he goes back to again and again and again throughout his career now if you’re not
The biggest Andy Warhol fan or you’re sort of just getting familiar with po pop art at this very moment you might be thinking how is this art he’s just making he’s just making illustrations of a product how is this art well he is standing on the shoulders of the
Geniuses that came before him in the 20th century so hat tip to Marcel Duchamp who um in the first Decades of the 20th century was really pushing the boundaries of of what people consider to be art and he did this most famous ly with this sculpture a ready-made
Sculpture meaning he did not make this and it is in fact a urinal it but it’s something that he chose to put on display in a gallery setting he did not alter it at all he just picked it and he actually signed a fake name to it and
Dated it and by doing this Marcel Duchamp uh forced everybody to consider that perhaps art is not about something you make with your hands or it doesn’t have to be something you make with your hands art can simply be a novel idea and that was something that galvanized Andy
Warhol in fact Andy Warhol went on to uh collect quite a bit of Marcel Dam’s work so um so this is kind of the concept that that warhall is working with and it’s interesting to say that or interesting to note that Andy Warhol once said um art is what you can get
Away with so that brings us ultimately to those famous Campbell Soup cans um the product that uh is probably most closely associated with Andy Warhol so these are 32 cans here uh done in 1962 and it’s really the early 1960s where we see this breakthrough into um uh pop art
Proper so he painted these he used a systematic process in order to do this and it was multi-step he would project the image trace it paint it and then stamp it it’s the that little golden flirtily at the bottom this was something that he stamped on there and
You’ll notice too of course we’ve got all the different flavors here so um so once again it looks like a commercial illustration it’s very hard to see the hand of the artist when you’re looking at this um and you might be thinking why Campbell Soup cans you know and um the
Most realistic answer that I have for that is supposedly he ate a lot of Campell soup during his lifetime but it’s also this um this very lowcost product that was uh mass-produced and mass consumed and sort of ubiquitous in American culture so I think that probably played a big role in terms of
Why he chose this as a subject matter so um when you look at Andy warhol’s Campbell suit cans I I have a feeling that um that maybe emotionally they’re kind of falling flat right now I I doubt anybody is sitting at their computer screen right now just beeping at the
Beauty of the Campell Soup cans because this isn’t really about um the the talent involved or the skill involved or even so much about the creative expression of the artist right um this isn’t any sort of highminded or elitist subject uh instead it’s really just him pushing us to consider maybe the
Definition of art is a little bit broader than what we thought of it as um than what we thought of it before and and Andy Warhol was still so young when he came up with the idea of the Campbell Soup cans here he is this is like such a
Reminder he was like practically a boy as he’s pushing these boundaries and the Museum of Modern Art held a symposium on pop art and basically everybody’s kind of fighting about the definitions and where it’s going and all that but he was his name was at the center of the drama
At the Symposium because nobody could really believe what he was doing he was like capitulating to consumer culture in such a Brazen way and nobody fully understood the why and the how of it uh when he was asked direct questions by reporters he would always kind of um hem
And ha and do a lot of um I don’t know um and and and and be a a little um opaque in terms of of his uh Mission here now I wanted to share with you just a few other Campbell Soup cans that I I
Find to be really fun this is one with a torn label and this just like this viscerally takes me back to my childhood and eating Campbell Soup cans and there’s always one with a torn label and you can see like you can you go back to
The sensory experience of what it was to tear that label but how perfect that he strove so hard to create the perfect Campbell Soup cans but he’s also willing to damage and destroy it too um and then over on the right uh an example of his silk screens from later in the 1960s
With these really bright colors in fact those bright colors inspired um Campbell Soup to do a specific 50th Anniversary label the 50th anniversary of Andy warhol’s Campbell Soup paintings and they issued this just for the Target Big Box store but they put Andy Warhol on the can and a fact simile of his
Signature there and I think Andy Warhol would have loved the idea that his that his imagery was literally being Mass consumed it it’s all coming full Circle there now from uh from the Campbell Soup cans came the Brillo boxes and we see him here uh posing with the Brillo boxes
And these these were familiar Grocery Market Staples too they were cardboard box boxes filled with uh Ste steel pads for uh cleaning your dishes and over here Andy Warhol and his Studio recreated these boxes with with not with cardboard but with um Plywood And they just recreated the LA using house p and
St and and and stencils and then they exhibited them in galleries stacked up tightly like you see here to essentially mirror what you might see in a grocery store and I think it’s probably also worth noting that it’s the 1960s it’s postwar America that everything’s commodified there’s an abundance of
Goods there’s no sense of scarcity so for a young man that grew up in the depression looking at the world that suddenly looks like this was probably um a startling kind of visual uh stimulation for him and it’s something that he was responding to now once again
You might be wondering if he’s pulled the wool over your eyes pun intended but um but he could be kind of playing with these bigger questions about what is American culture right now so as he’s considering branding in terms of making this leap from the world of Commercial
Art to Fine Art he begins branding himself too he gone are the days of Raggedy Andy right there’s no more bow ties now all of a sudden he’s Mr Cool and he would even talk about like putting on his Andy suit to go out for
The most part it was uh the glasses he was uh almost always dressing all in black and he had and he affected this whole new personality uh at least publicly one of his friends described it this way he said his metamorphosis into a pop person Persona was calculated and
Deliberate the fery was left behind and he gradually evolved from a sophisticate who held subscription tickets to the Metropolitan Opera to a sort of gum chewing seemingly naive teeny bopper addicted to the lowest forms of popular culture so of course Andy warhol’s look is instantly recognizable so write this
On your calendar right now it will be the easiest Halloween costume come October so basically he were all black it was like Steve Jobs or Elizabeth waren it’s almost like he was somebody who devoted all of his um creative thinking to things that were way more important than than putting together a
Stylish outfit and then of course he becomes known for the wigs later on and these photos here too sort of showing that Evolution are also a good reminder of how self-conscious he was about his own appearance you can see um some discoloration in his skin here too from
That childhood disease obviously he had a receding hair hairline which is why he started playing with wigs too so that will sort of come back up again as we move through uh the program tonight so we see him kind of launching himself he’s branding himself and now it’s it’s
Time to um like I said bring the production to scale and that’s why you would open a factory right it’s time to make some real money and Andy Warhol said being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art making money is Art and working is Art and good business
Is the best art so here we have Andy Warhol making art about money and this is a little bit like those Coca-Cola bottles that we saw before an early work that um replicates something that is uh instantly recognized well $1 bill but there’s still this expressive um
Component to it and then the silk screens of the of the $1 bills where we can see that he is playing with the recognizability and discernability of this image and then later on just the dollar signs it’s all about money it’s all about value um and even though it’s
Easy to say okay well he’s just doing the same thing that we saw with the coke um this is a little bit different this isn’t a grocery store commodity this is essentially Andy Warhol um creating Works about the uh that are about the the very value of the things that he’s
Creating he is essentially painting his paychecks as he’s painting money um so he he would say that this is a subject that he was truly passionate about incidentally this other version of a $1 bill that he created in 1962 recently sold for more than $32 million I think Andy Warhol would have
Been so proud if he knew that that was what to was to become of his $1 bill here so Andy warhall had a a pretty sort of flippant re idea about um how his artwork related to money and how his patrons might think of of collecting his
Artwork he said I like money on the wall say you were going to buy a painting I think you should just take that money tie it up and hang it on the wall then when somebody visited you the first thing they would see is the money on the
Wall so why not just paint the dollar sign and and make it clear that somebody spent a lot of money for it essentially so this is um an exhibition of his dollar sign works from 2004 now where was he doing all of this uh let’s turn our attention to where the
Money was being made this is a 1966 photograph of Andy Warhol in his Studio known as the factory or the silver Factory because you’ll notice that it is completely covered in aluminum foil and you might be thinking why would he do that well of course the the silver color
I think sort of references a factory setting and mass production and um and the foil itself was cheap and mass– produced too so I’m sure he he enjoyed it for that reason so uh the factory was founded in 1962 and it had three different locations over about the next
Two decades so it was like an institution there for some time and it wasn’t just a place where um artwork was made it was a Gathering Place too so um legendary parties at Andy warhol’s Factory and you’re if you’re searching for him in this crowd I think this is
Him back here with the Sun glasses on um this is a photo from 1964 Andy Warhol surrounded himself with Fascinating People um artists musicians intellectuals drag queens playwrights Bohemian Street people and then of course wealthy patrons you could go to a party at the factory and maybe run into
Truman capot Bob Dylan MC Jagger Alan Ginsburg I mean everybody kind of moved through there at some point or another and if you were really lucky Andy Warhol might take you over for a screen test now what is a screen test we are looking at a film still from one of his screen
Tests they were um they were filming that were rarely pre-arranged it was like this opportunity presents itself and Andy Warhol or one of his assistants would take a guest who was there at the factory have them sit down and stare directly into a camera for about three minutes and that’s all that they’re
Tasked to do and oftentimes Andy Warhol or his assistant would just walk away and then the screen test was essentially playing back that footage in slow motion so you can imagine if you’re watching it every sort of glance to the side or blink all of a sudden is imbued with all
All the significance and you become fascinated by the tiny movements of this face it was an absolutely novel approach to portraiture and I think it’s something that a lot of artists today are still kind of playing with I mean I think we all kind of play with it to a
Certain degree if you’re playing with your phone and and and and selfies so Andy Warhol made about 500 of these screen uh tests over the course of just like two or three years and um and it was people like Edie Sedwick here uh who sort of came to be part of warhol’s
Entourage at this time he he had this click that he explicitly promoted he called them Superstars he coined that term they became celebrities so he was literally manufacturing celebrities there at um at the factory and of course he was also making some art too that all
All came into the process as well so here we can see that um he was working with assistants and he was making a lot of silk screens and lithographs things where he could make an original and then they could be reproduced uh fairly easily so don’t get cynical about this
Because because uh having a workshop and having apprentices doing most of the work is something is an age-old tradition in in art of probably your favorite Renaissance Masters did the exact same thing and um and your favorite Renaissance painting uh was maybe only you know touched up by a
Master in the face in the hand so Andy Warhol could be fairly um hands off in in the production of a lot of this artwork but he was still there at the factory and engaged with what was going on but he was always coming up with new
Ideas as well so a lot of his artwork had to deal with or had to do with with film making and his very first film I find this hysterical his very first film is simply called Sleep it was a five-hour film of his then boyfriend at the time simply
Sleeping and Andy Warhol screened this film for several of his friends and so they’re just watching this guy sleep snore roll over occasionally and um in the middle of it Andy Warhol apparently said Gee this is very boring let’s go get a cup of coffee but he was once
Again doing something revolutionary by just filming someone sleeping and and even imagining it that other people might be interested in watching it this is of course the very Genesis of reality TV I’m sure all of us uh even if you don’t want to admit it we’ve probably
Watched at least an hour of reality TV where people were doing really boring things but somehow because it was on a screen we were fully engaged with it weren’t we and Andy Warhol started it by filming his boyfriend sleeping now he was engaged with um with TV quite a bit
Throughout his career in fact he said he wanted to do a special on his favorite subject which was he said nothing and he would call it the nothing special that sort of seems like a precursor to Seinfeld in some ways he had two TV shows um including Andy warhol’s TV um
And also Andy warhol’s 15 minutes and he made referring to the 15 minutes of fame quote that we started with that Gian shared and besides that he um made frequent celebrity appearances on shows like the loveboat and SNL and that sort of thing so ultimately Andy Warhol
Produced something like 150 films a lot of them were experimental films like Empire or Chelsea girls but I wanted to share uh these film Stills with you to see where it all began Andy Warhol also dipped toe into publishing he was a co-founder of interview magazine I love
The cover of the first issue the first issue Collectors Edition all this nudity what a great way to get um some attention well here he is in um in a Polaroid from years later reading this his own Magazine with his name splashed across the cover uh interview magazine
Was nicknamed the the crystal ball of pop because it gave him so much access to um artists or well really uh singers and actors and um and models and so everybody was really interested in in what he was producing there so if you’re wondering whatever happened to interview
Magazine it did shut down in 2018 but I think it relaunched the same year so I think it might still be around and here is h a cover from the 1990s so long after Andy warhol’s death they are still um banking on his celebrity they’re showing Andy Warhol in drag um with this
Kind of silk screen process that he becomes so famous for so um as with so many things the idea of interview magazine became a self-perpetuating cycle of celebrity so let’s fully turn our attention to celebrity now Andy Warhol said my idea of a good picture is
One that’s in focus and of a famous person so he is probably the very first person to unabashed unabashedly love the famous um when he himself was already famous too and of course that brings us to the quote that he said you know in the future everybody would be famous for
15 minutes and with YouTube It’s kind of true isn’t it he predicted the future there so we are now looking at his 1962 painting called the Golden Marilyn and he created this uh soon after the actress’s apparent suicide that same year and um and he did this based off of
Uh stills of photos of her from a movie that she had done in the 1950s called Niagara and then he silk screens that image of her and he adds color to it this kind of um bright almost garish color this turquoise um collar here and then these heavy litted eyes have this
Turquoise uh blue eyes Shadow on it uh almost blood red lips here a pink flesh of her face and then this brassy Golden Hair um and then he surrounds it with with gold as though she is a saint or as though she is the Divine and uh that
Brings us right back to that church that he grew up with uh those icons that he stared at as a child multiple times a week well he has transformed a celebrity into one of those Saints he’s literally canonized her here um especially so because of this untimely death that she
Experienced I think it’s worth noting that um that he has almost rendered her face somewhat mask likee in this case especially with this sort of cheap tabloid processing of of of this of the the silk screening here and that perhaps speaks to the idea that if she’d committed suicide that that even though
She’s this beautiful public figure that she was struggling with things that were obviously beneath the surface and that you see him exploring once again in this next work from the same year called the Marilyn diptic and the diptic uh diptic is an art historical term that essentially refers to a two panel
Painting um historically they were often hinged together so they could be folded closed or or then opened up and so those two panels oftentimes have a relationship to each other here he’s replicated that same golden Maryland um a number of times and then there’s like a ghostly image of that maryn over on
The right here in black and white so uh so he’s playing with that notion of the mask and the general recognizability of this woman uh and you know in in some places she’s almost indiscernible but she’s become comodified obviously like the the Coca colola bottles or like the
Campbell Soup cans in so many ways but um I think it is also interesting that he is playing with this especially sultry image of her and trying to play up just how sultry she is um knowing and and balancing off this um this this sad aspect of her life the the
Struggles that that she was dealing with kind of behind the scenes there so um silk screening here I I haven’t mentioned yet is a printmaking process it’s something that was usually reserved for the world of Commercial Art Andy Warhol didn’t invent it he wasn’t the
First fine artist ever to use it but he is the person that um that really employs to to such an extent to to such an extens of uh uh uh uh to such an extent as an artist so each one of these silk screens is considered an original
Work of art okay so um he continues on with pop culture with the celebrities that he loves he turns his attention to Liz Taylor and once again we can see him not really attempting to align the different registers here in terms of the silk screen he’s not trying to perfectly
Place the red on her lips or the turquoise even over her her eyebrows here somehow just the red lips and the and the blue eyes are enough to signify just um her femininity uh her her sex appeal here and so uh so the black areas of this silk screen again are are
Printed as though it were a cheap tabloid newspaper and so we get um this very rough sense of who she is here at just the important parts in some ways now Andy Warhol sort of became a little bit obsessed with with Liz Taylor and then later on they they became good
Friends Andy Warhol said I love Los Angeles I love Hollywood they’re so beautiful everything’s plastic but I love plastic I want to be plastic he also said he wanted to be a machine at one point too so um so to sort of round out his um his bingo card of of 1950s
Celebrities in the early 1960s he created this double El Vis here and it it’s Elvis I believe from one of his films where he was playing a cowboy and I just love the devil Elvis because it suggests movements it reminds me of the way Elvis dances and you can see that
It’s almost a life-sized silk screen here now apparently in this image where’re Andy Warhol just hanging around with Bob Dylan Bob Dylan had come to the factory I believe he did a screen test while he was there and then as payment for his time he asked for the double
Elvis and I believe he got it because Andy Warhol was actually so Star Struck by Bob Dylan that he that he let him take it but I mean ordinarily it was like um it it it was you should have paid to be able to have a screen test
You you weren’t going to be paid for it and Bob Dylan was the only person who apparently got away with that now another idea that Andy Warhol was playing with uh especially a little bit later on as he’s working with silk screening in the 1970s when uh uh
Diploma sort of opens up with China and Nixon uh goes to visit ma Andy Warhol becomes fascinated by the images of ma in China and he begins to associate or at least see the parallel between political propaganda and capitalist advertising so he does a whole series on
Chairman Mao um that you might be familiar with and he continues to focus on celebrities too so here he is with MC Jagger in the photograph and us a a portrait of MC Jagger here and you can see that by the 1970s he’s being a little bit more Artful with the way that
He’s composing these silk screens he’s adding in what looks like some line drawings here and he’s printing uh certain colors with um with I I I feel like with a more expressive more artistic Bend here rather than just trying to replicate something that looked like it was printed for a tabloid
But still focusing on the lips and the eyelids very much so so we’ll round out uh uh Andy warhol’s approach to silk screen portraits here with the last portrait of Blondie or Debbie Harry we can see him taking the photograph that probably inspired the work over here on
The left and it brings us to how were these Works received um did did everybody want to be silk screened by Andy Warhol I think to a certain degree I think that’s true because over the years various computers and phones that I’ve had have allowed you to do that
Like you can you can replicate an Andy Warhol aesthetic pretty easily on your phones these days but the critics weren’t always so kind one critic in particular um that I came across said you know these these Works were superficial they were fail they were commercial they had no depth or
Indication of the significance of the subjects but I think the overall take is that’s the point Andy Warhol wanted to focus on superficiality and and um commercialism as a mirror to our times as the most brilliant mirror to our times there’s um there’s this sense that he had his
Finger on the pulse of of what was important to Americans in the 1970s and he produced images that spoke exactly to that and of course he inserted himself in this process too um move over Kim Kardashian it was actually Andy Warhol who was the King of the selfies so we
Can see various photographs that he took of himself over the years starting with the 1960s where he looks like hipster off the street today um into um I I believe this is from the 1980s uh again another image of him in drag a Polaroid where he’s um playing
With gender here playing with makeup and wigs and then over to a very late self-portrait um that was done I believe just a year or so before his death and you can sort of get the sense that he is there’s like this this Grim solemnity to his face as though he sort of
Acknowledges that that um his own death is is so sort of coming for him and of course the the wig is um all kinds of crazy here too okay so that brings us to the subject of death and Andy warhall um when we think about celebrities celebrities especially if you make an
Image of them they’re Immortal right but Andy bhal had to contend with the notion of death in his works for very interesting reason right after he did the Campbell Soup cans he had a curator friend say to him you know these are great but if you really want to be taken
Seriously as an artist you have to do something that’s a little bit more serious so Andy Warhol decided to do something called the death and disaster series and this is an example of those works it’s another dip tick two panels together and this is um called the
Mustard race riot from that death and disaster series it’s from 1963 so we have silk screened on one side all of these newspaper images of a race riot in Birmingham Alabama and then on the other side nothing just that that that golden color a field of color there and so he
Is uh it’s almost as though he’s forcing us to to contend with that news and then perhaps even making a commentary of like how quickly that news comes and goes sometimes so um so he continues on with the with the subject of death with heavier subjects here I won’t spend too
Much time with this but but this was uh a work that he called the lavender disaster and we are looking at an electric chair that had just been uh sort of famously used two times that same year and um but I wanted to sort of jump ahead to the tuna fish disaster
Because it relates so well to his other work we’re looking at more cans here again right and um and now not celebrities but the faces of women who had been been killed actually by some tainted tuna so here he’s trying to add some gravitas to his work but there’s a
A little bit of of a silliness to this too just replicating the tunic hands and then the faces of of those women who had passed away so he’s he’s finding his way in all of this and I think he kind of finds success by the time he gets to
These uh nine Jackies in 1964 so this was just on the heels of President Kennedy’s death and uh and of course um as that happened as as that news unfolded and the country mned the loss of this young president uh people were exposed to Jackie Kennedy’s response to
It and and her grief and her emotion and I think for in in large part it helped them process their own feelings so these images of Jackie Kennedy were so um important to the country at the time and Andy Warhol essentially makes a history painting about the death of the
President without even including the president in it or like the facts of his death other than how it impacted his wife so we see her here smiling we see her here um grieving and in shock and um and here he is once again giving us an
Entirely new way of picturing or um or or making permanent some moment in U some important moment in our our our history here so um death is something that actually came for Andy Warhol um not too much longer later uh you might remember that Andy Warhol was shot in
1968 uh the woman who shot him was a woman named Valerie solanis who um had been kind of in the circle of people who were visiting at the factory and I think they had even done a film together at some point she was there to I think pick
Up uh a script that she had dropped off and Andy bhal was meeting with a museum curator she came in and she shot at the curator he got a superficial wound and was treated and released from the hospital she shot three times at Andy Warhol missed twice but that third shot
Went through his spleen his stomach his liver his esophagus and his lungs and when I say that he was on death’s door I mean it’s not hyperb he was at he he made it to the emergency room he had no pulse but by some Stroke of Luck the doctor opened his eye and
Saw that his pupil responded to light and they were able to bring him back and so um Andy Warhol uh well they say he lived for 20 years after that but there was a part of him that sort of departed after such a horrible experience so um
Not surprisingly he um he wanted to share with the world what what he what he experence experienced and so he got a great photographer Richard avidon to take these photographs of him shortly afterwards and the scars I mean they’re shocking he he went through so much and
So many surgeries to keep him alive and then he had to wear this corset for the rest of his life I love the the look on his face over here um and here’s just a another detail of all of the scars just that one bullet did so much damage to
His poor body so um he was obviously physically and emotionally scarved by what he went through the artist Alice Neil did a portrait of Andy Warhol in 1970 so about two years after the shooting and he took his shirt off for this portrait and he’s wearing that
Corset and you can see the scars and she’s painted him in such a way that it almost looks like he has women’s breasts here and he just looks so incredibly vulnerable and and and old and and and sort of uh feeble here but um but also kind of determined to persevere in some
Ways I think it’s such an incredible and beautiful portrait that we see here so this brings us to Andy warhol’s Legacy and and his actual death here so um one of the very smart things that he did towards the end of his career I mean he
I don’t think he was as interested in you know going out to Studio 54 but he became very interested in younger artists and supporting the careers of younger artists and sort of like Oprah he would choose people he would choose people who were interesting and worth people’s time and that just catapulted
Them to stardom including Keith Herring over here on the left and Jean Michelle basat who we see over on the right um and these were essentially two graffiti artists that uh became International Superstars really and then Andy Warhol very smartly began to collaborate with them to make artwork with them this is a
Publicity still um U related to a a collaboration that Warhol did with basat now basat died at the age of 27 so young but it’s because of this relationship really with Andy Warhol that we still remember his name or that a work like this by basat uh recently sold for $110
Million really very few graffiti artists go from um anonymity to a superstar status and then um to record-breaking auction price R es without the help of a superstar like Andy Warhol so let’s turn our attention to Andy warhol’s uh death and end of life so I’ve just inserted
One of his silk screams here appropriately of a skull now Andy Warhol died in 1987 at the age of 58 now according to news reports he’d been making a good recovery from like a routine gallbladder surgery um but he died in his sleep after a post-operative irregular heartbeat so after his death
He was brought back to Pittsburgh for a b his burial and of course this was a a star studded event too Yoko Ono spoke at his funeral and then Andy Warhol was laid to rest beside his mother and his father um today the Andy Warhol Museum
Which is located in Pittsburgh is one of the largest museums in the United States dedicated it is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist one of the most comprehensive single artist museums in the world um there are thousands of works of art on
Display a lot of the the funds that were raised for this museum were um came from the auction of Andy warhol’s actual possessions and that also started h a foundation called the Andy Warhol foundation for the visual arts program which uh still to this day is one of the
Greatest funders of artists in this country they recently gave away I think $4 million to 20 different artists across the United States just this year so that’s a really important Legacy U um that that uh I think his family should be so proud of and of course when it
Comes to auctions he is like the bellweather for um for the Art Market and I’m sure you probably heard that just uh just two years ago now this image shot Sage BL s shot Sage blue Maryland from 1964 sold for a record record-breaking $195 million it’s really hard to believe
But if Andy Warhol selling basically the rest of the art markets doing pretty well he was only 36 years old when he made this so it brings us to the very end we end with the idea that this poor boy from Pittsburgh who grew up in the
Depression was able to make it as a success in New York City um he went on from that to revolutionize the art world to become a worldwide Superstar w in the process supporting the careers of other artists he was an indisputable success he balanced commercial and entrepreneurial Endeavors with Avant
Guard and underground work he lived a life that was very true to who he was and it’s probably the reason why people still go to his grave and leave Tomato Soup cans for him to this day now the most appropriate tribute to Andy Warhol is the fact that there is a camera on
His grave that does a live feed to the internet 24 hours a day still so it I it’s just the perfect way to honor a man who made a five-hour movie about sleep but also the perfect way to extend Andy warhol’s 15 minutes of fame so I will
End there now and I welcome any questions or comments you have about Andy Warhol thank you very much everyone I’ll start going through the Q&A here too um Deborah says did Andy Warhol get permission to use these brands in his art Deborah I should know that but my hunch is
No um he uh he was just trying to make this very bold leap but probably not surprisingly these Brands began to collect him I think the Coca-Cola company owns something like 15 or 20 of his paintings now on the subject of Coca-Cola so um so he did it well enough
That that he didn’t get in trouble uh Stephen says too bad he was not alive for Princess Diana right he would have canonized her too great comment Stephen uh Diane says were there copyright issues with his pictures of living celebrities or did he get releases from those celebrities did they get any
Royalties um Diane these are all great questions and I don’t have the specific answers but my sense is is that the celebrities wanted uh to be uh canonized and and um captured immortalized I should say by Andy Warhol so I think they were willing participants that uh that essentially gave that permission I
Don’t think he um I don’t think he ever asked for permission for Logos or pictures or that sort of thing um and part of part of pop art was really just appropriating these things and maybe um begging for forgiveness later if if these kinds of issues arose uh an
Anonymous attendee said he had a very distinctive hair and dress style that reminds me of Georgia O’Keefe was he influenced by her wow great assoc ation um Georg o’keef is another person that you know would wear a lot of black um you know I in my research I didn’t come
Across any any cross-pollination there but Georgio Keef certainly had that same almost commercial like aesthetic with her painting where oftentimes she strove to make her brush work invisible so it’s really interesting to think that that um that maybe they they sort of learned from each other I do know that by the
Time she was was in her 80s she and Andy Warhol would hang out but I think that was more of a function of the fact that they were both famous and artists um more so than the fact that they were um learning from each other’s work but
Great question thank you for asking um Carol thanks for the kind words Theo says are there any living relatives oh Theo thanks for asking because um I’m not sure if they’re living but he did have um Brothers as I mentioned and they had children so uh one of his nephews
James warala wrote uh stories about Uncle Andy so those are good things to be looking forward looking for uh maybe there’s even some some books at the chumford library or um some of our partnering libraries but um I’m not sure if any of those descendants are still
Alive today it’s probably a safe bet that they are Edgar says do you have the link to his gravite camera internet transmission Edgar I’m sorry I don’t have it on hand but if you were to Google right now probably uh live feed of warhol’s grave it would probably be
The first thing that comes up okay let’s see I think we got through okay one more question here a curator at the Warhol Museum told me they have boxes and boxes of his paper that they haven’t even looked at yet wow I have not been there
That’s on my bucket list uh sounds like they need a lot of interns over there um that’s really interesting to know and it is fascinating even like the smaller museums that I’ve worked at have such a backlog of of that sort of thing and that those are like the treasure
Troves too so um so thanks for sharing that so that’s really fascinating I think we’ll we’ll be learning a lot more about Andy Warhol as all of those things are are kind of poured through oh thanks for adding the the grave site in the chat too I appreciate that um let’s see
Here I’m just going back in the chat to see if there’s more questions back there I always love to see where people are from thanks for adding that Chicago New Jersey this is so exciting um let’s see here the UK um oh and then Melvin adds that that
Andy Warhol was doing the starving artist tactics as a professional that’s really interesting in Insight um you know obviously I I I don’t remember much of Andy Warhol from like my childhood but it’s interest it’s always interesting to to me to hear from people you know what were their impressions of
Him um when uh when Warhol was alive Melvin says amazing how he did branding before that was a thing when you think Andy when you think Warhol a very specific image comes to mind arguably he influenced manga production manga it’s created this sort of conveyor belt fashion with a number of assistants
Doing the bulk of the work that’s so interesting actually next month’s artist if you’re GNA come to next month’s program kahindi Wy really and he did the famous portrait of President Obama um really interesting in terms of um the assistance and how they contribute to
His work this so this is like an ongoing issue in um in the world of art um but branding yeah I mean he had he had this foresight he you know it’s like he understood the the Zeitgeist really of what was happening in America and what
An influence that he’s had I think we are our awareness to and maybe even appreciation of branding today I mean it all comes from him Lisa’s here hi Lisa Lisa says he challenges the notion of iconography from religious icons to his symbology of home brilliantly put Lisa I
Love that thank you for contributing that and yes it just you just beautifully tied everything together there um cimu is considered to be an existentialist writer but Warhol came up with the popular look of self-labeled existentialists in France in 19 in the 1960s I wonder if art schools address
The business side of art um they touch on it it’s very interesting it with the art schools that that I’m familiar with it’s it’s uh it’s always offered up as a piece of it but I think Andy Warhol was probably just just as interested in in the business side of
Of it than um than than the art making side too let’s see here um lots of questions about did he get permission I do I do not think he did um and Lisa adds too given how much he Alters the reference image too thanks for adding that
Lisa and Jeff you’re asking if I could explain the silk screening process I would I would be explaining it very badly I think but I think there’s wonderful wonderful resources and for me I’m such a visual person to like watch someone on YouTube like how to make a
Silk screen that would probably be your best bet because I I I’m afraid I would explain it pretty badly um okay I think did he dye his hair white Alice asked Alice he started wearing I’m not sure if at at an early age he started to dye his hair white but um at
A pretty early age he started wearing a wig so it might have been a wig um even the um before the wigs be got got very wild um he was wearing um some hair okay um oh asked do I know how many silk screens in total he made whoa it’s
It’s a huge number I don’t know off hand but that’s a great question to try and track down it seems as though there’s an unlimited uh um uh an unlimited number and prie asks what do I mean to make the brush Strokes invisible I’m so glad you
Asked for Clarity on that um it’s really this idea okay what if if we’re thinking about making the brush Strokes visible that would be like French impressionism like just just blotting it and um making the breast Strokes invisible means creating the seamless effect of let’s say you’re doing a portrait like the
Seamless effect of perfect flesh of the textures of somebody’s hair or of their sweater or something like that to almost make something look photographic and um and certainly artists were striving towards that even before photography existed uh um and then it becomes a a whole different thing when we’re talking about
Commercial Art too so uh so I’m glad you asked for clarification there and I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear as I went along um let’s see I think I got to most of these and thank you everybody to for um for your kind words Bonita asked what happened to
His Studio oh Bonita forever ago I had been looking at that um I think people in New York City like do travel around to the different sites just to like go to like those doorsteps but I think these uh the Studios have long since become other things if I’m remembering
Correctly um any thoughts on Jeff Coon’s carrying War Hall’s mantle yeah he’s probably the best person doing that these days or one of the best person one of the best people um I think we just about covered all of it gaana and thank you everybody for the very kind words
And again for being with us tonight I very very much appreciate that awesome yes so I a couple people have asked if um this was recorded so yes the presentation was recorded um all of you that have registered will get an email with that recording so take a look
In your inboxes for that sometime tomorrow hopefully early next week if not that um so uh and again thank you all so much for joining us tonight Jane thank you again for a great presentation I look forward to seeing everybody back hopefully for next month for February
Black History Month uh cind Wy color and lender and that’s going to be February 29th at 7 p.m. so please register for that as well all right everybody have a good night