7 minute read
Andy Warhol: The Man Who Created the Extraordinary out of the Ordinary
Biography
Chi-Chien Huang Jan. 5th 2021
Andy Warhol has changed the art world and loved by many generations since 1960s. First, Warhol’s uniqueness and charisma made him an influential figure. Second, Warhol was the key contributor to the pop art movement. Third, Warhol bridged the chasm between fine art and commercialism. Fourth, Warhol’s works reflected the ordinary life, making them easily understood by people. Fifth, Warhol’s ideas and art works inspired later generations around the world.
Soup cans, a banana, and massive copies of celebrity portraits— these ordinary objects became art works that sell millions of dollars in the hands of Andy Warhol, the iconic Pop artist. He made an art form out of advertising and brilliance out of banality. He made people pay attention to the trivia of lives, and rethink about the essence of living. His uniqueness and charisma made him an influential figure in the 1960s, and he continues to inspire people around the world in the 21st century.
Andy Warhol Grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb in the 1930s, his parents were immigrants from Slovakia. As a child, he loved wandering through the “Czech ghetto with the babushkas and overalls on the clothes lines” (Ingram 6).This experience developed into his insight to the ordinary lives. Every week, the Warhols went to St. John, the Catholic church, where the young Andy stared hour after hour at its colorful icons on the gilded wall. Little did he know, later he would become a New York icon himself, and his artworks would shine out for many generations to behold.
Hiding behind sunglasses and wearing an enigmatic smile on his face, Warhol had a mysterious charisma. When he was eight, Warhol contracted chorea, a rare disease of the nervous system that kept him in bed for three months. When other kids were playing around outside the house, Warhol was soaking in the world of comics and posters in his bedroom and drawing all day long. As if life wasn’t cruel enough for him, his father tragically died from poisoned water when he was fourteen. Therefore, the tragedy resulted in his taciturnity. He talked little and always showed up with his iconic look— sunglasses, leather jacket, and ripped jeans. Just as the writer Steven Shaviro once said, “The best work of Warhol is himself.” It was clear that the name of Warhol represented a unique, avant-garde and mysterious brand (Ingram 34).
Warhol was the key contributor to the Pop Art movement. Named for its appropriation of imagery from popular culture, Pop Art is transient, expendable, and witty. Pop artists used repetition, mass production, and mechanical techniques to overthrow the ideas of artistic originality. Additionally, it challenged the elitism of high art by introducing the ordinary and secular subject matter— advertisements, comic books, product packaging, and even money— into the category of fine arts.
Though Pop Art originated in the 1950s in Britain, it was not prominent until the ‘60s in America. In the late ‘50s, a wave of artists started to question the main art style at the era —Abstract Expressionism (Madoff 16). Since the style focused on the matter of spiritual searching, it was unrealistic and out of touch with everyday life. In the early ‘60s, Warhol became the most influential one among those artists, and translated the ethos of Pop Art into an entire lifestyle. He believed that art is not a privilege for the elite but a gift for everyone.
In 1962, Warhol presented the beauty of the ordinary in one of his most representative work— Campbell’s Soup Cans. It was a collection of Campbell’s soup cans in the complete thirty-two flavors. Each can was silkscreen printed on a canvas in 16 x 20 inches. This work was a joke to the critics when it was published. To them, those cans were too mundane to be entitled as “art.” However, it was their accessibility to all human that attracted Warhol, along with the simplicity and boldness in their bright red covers.
Warhol not only showed his embrace of everyday life but also revealed the pursuit of equality in his works. He once quoted, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see
Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking” (Warhol 100-101). His idea of bridging the chasm between fine art and commercialism served as a pivotal turning point in 20th century art.
Warhol's works were like mirrors, they reflected the minute details of ordinary lives. He reveled in capturing the moment of living by his camera. Ethel Scull Thirty-six Times, is among the best known of Warhol’s early Pop portraits and was one of his first commissioned ones. Warhol took art collector Ethel Scull to a photo booth in Times Square and photographed her, creating twentyfour sheets each of four photographs. Then he chose the best shots to make a 36-frame portrait. “What I liked about it mostly was that it was a portrait of being alive,” said Ethel. In one photograph she was playing with her large round sunglasses, looking silly, and in another one she was laughing because Warhol was tickling her. The portrait radiated energy and liveness. With the usage of repetition and vibrant colors, it seemed that Ethel was about to jump out from the frame in anytime.
However, life isn’t always as bright as the colors shown in Ethel’s portrait. Warhol didn’t only display the moment of living, but also reveal the melancholy of death. One of his most representative portrait— Marilyn , was created after the death of Marilyn Monroe. Underneath the glamorous features of the Hollywood super star, one can sense the tension around her mouth. Her lips were tight, and her teeth clenched firmly. According to cultural critic Roland Barthes, a great photograph has its “punctum”, which is the sensory, intensely subjective effect of a photograph on the viewer: “The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me,” said Barthes. The punctum that lay in Marilyn’s smile revealed her sufferings behind the curtain of fame and the tragic death she faced.
Andy Warhol deeply impacted the course of art history. He changed the definition of art by choosing the ordinary as the subject matter of his works. He combined high art and consumerism, opening a door for modern artists. Moreover, he reveled in the details of ordinary lives, effectively collapsing the boundary between high and low culture. Even though he died at 58, his ideas and art works have kept on inspiring later generations around the world.
Work Cited
Ingram, Catherine. This is Andy Warhol. Laurence King Publishing, 2014. Madoff, Steven Henry, ed. Pop art: a critical history. Univ of California Press, 1997.
Mitchell, Jack. Andy Warhol with Archie, his pet Dachshund. 1973, photo, Wiki Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andy_Warhol_by_Jack_ Mitchell.jpg
Warhol, Andy. Campbell's Soup Cans. 1962, Silkscreen on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, origins.osu.edu/milestones/ november-2012-andy-warhol-s-campbell-s-soup-cans-1962?language_ content_entity=en
Warhol, Andy. Ethel Scull Thirty-six Times. 1963, Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, www.whitney.org/collection/works/692.
Warhol, Andy. Marilyn. 1962, Silkscreen, WikiArt, www.wikiart.org/en/andywarhol/marilyn-1.
Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again. Harvest, 1977.
