Exhilarating and breathtaking works takes away the whole of your attention and keeps your thoughts provoked for at least the next two days, and the visuals go in a loop.
Andy Warhol was a multi-talented person who carried the titles of an artist, a film director, a producer, and a leading figure in Pop Art, a visual art movement. His work is defined in the domain of Avantgarde and commercial culture. He expresses his artistic talent in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, silkscreening, photography, and film.
Early life and Career | Andy Warhol
Being born in a working-class immigrant family in the neighbourhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol was diagnosed with Chorea by the end of the single-digit age. During these bedridden days, he started drawing for the first time, and Warhol developed this skill as a child artist.
With his father’s lifetime savings, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design. Further, he studied commercial art and made a career in magazine illustration and advertising.
Philosophy
Understanding Andy Warhol’s philosophy is not only tricky but subjective and has multiple interpretations. In his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again),” he has explained himself as nothing but a void. Clear canvas with no strokes of involvement, affection, or emotion. Some say he has managed to make himself like a machine with no empathy. He called himself a large clear surface with a missing dimension.
“If someone asks me, ‘What’s your problem,’” says Warhol. “I’d have to say, ‘Skin.’”
Andy Warhol’s philosophy ranges in the dimensions of fame, work, beauty, success, and love. Essentially his views on these were very paradoxical to the existing common beliefs. He believes them to be nothing but upside-down disorders that people are trying to balance. He poses a quintessential reflection or contemplation to society which can provoke anyone’s thought that what in life is real and what is a reel.
In the modern world, the two are combined with almost no clarity. We see so many simulations in almost everything and sugar-coated communication in nearly all spheres that it is impossible to see the true mirror of society.
His Working Style
This quality of Andy Warhol’s art was to distinguish from the mainstream and think beyond the style of contemporary art. He used different media to depict his exceptionality in abstract and exhilarating ideas. He was the one who introduced avant-garde pop art in 1960.
He was employed in capturing the essence of everyday lives from a different and bold outlook. His art tries to bring the commercial branding of a picture. Warhol had not worked with a single medium, rather with all the possible modes of expression such as drawing, painting, film screening, etc. The existing modes were not enough for the ideas of Andy Warhol to be expressed. Silk screening, a new form of art, was pioneered by Andy Warhol to set a whole new realm in art which opened the door for multiple interpretations of Warhol’s art by the Americans.
Andy Warhol’s art tends to be very individualistic and distinct from others’ styles. In the world of cinema, he adopted the usual narrative form of expression, but his style of delivering a film again makes it a task of exegesis. His films directly target society through various issues. One of the very controversial concepts in films by Warhol was the postulation of time and boredom, which targets the most elite class of the society. Controversial thoughts and disorders of Society were the main themes of Andy Warhol’s art and film.
Works of Andy Warhol
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Marilyn Diptych 1962
After moving to New York, he began commercial arts to earn his living. One of his series was the portraits of stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Kennedy. He used his new mode of art, ‘silkscreen printing,’ to create these portraits. The most famous work of this series, Marilyn Diptych 1962 when the film star Marilyn Monroe died.
Warhol immediately started making portraits of the actress to advertise the film Niagara which Monroe had starred in. The portraits were based on a photograph taken by Gene Kornman in 1953. This work of Andy Warhol was exhibited in his first New York exhibition.
The canvas is made up of two parts, each of which features a grid of 25 Marilyn portraits. Portraits in the left part of the canvas were bold and vibrant colours representing the energy, while the other was monochrome and fading. These contrasting parts in one canvas show the philosophy of Andy Warhol depicted in the life of Monroe that the reel (Left) and real (right) life of Monroe had just the opposing and contrasting characters.
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Campbell’s Soup Box 1985
Another artwork that Warhol made was his Campbell’s soup paintings. Warhol made artworks depicting Campbell’s packaging—the simple graphics symbolizing the ordinary life of Americans. He used to make minimalist artwork by repeating the grid formations and transforming the items in the grid. These packages were a huge success in the career of Andy Warhol.
In 1985, impressed by the packaging graphics by Warhol, the Campbell’s Soup company commissioned Warhol to create a series of paintings of their dry-mix soups for advertisement. Campbell’s Soup Box 1985 is one of the paintings of this series that shows a chicken noodle package, with hand-drawn elements and photographs.
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Self-Portrait with Fright Wig
Andy Warhol created another very interesting series of his self-portraits. He caricatures himself in his portraits by exaggerating every element. In this series, Self-Portrait with Fright Wig, the dark clothing separates his body from his extra white head, appearing ghostly with the silver wig on his head and straight facing eyes. He used to change this wig in a range of disguises for his self-portrait series. This series was the last series of Andy Warhol before his death in 1987.
Recognition After Death | Andy Warhol
In 1968 an American feminist, Valerie Solanas, attempted to shot Andy Warhol. He was badly injured by this episode. This incident made the concept of death more fascinating to Warhol. The gun used for the shot was similar to the .22 snub-nosed pistol that Solanas used. Warhol then used the same gun in his art that made him become the cultural icon of America.
He depicted the gun in a very casual and subtle consumer-like product in his art, reflecting his philosophy of insignificant objects, emptiness, and nothingness in life.
“I said that I wasn’t creative since I was shot, because after that I stopped seeing creepy people,” Warhol wrote in his diary in November 1978.
In 1987, the artist died of cardiac arrest. Even after 30 years of his death, Andy Warhol, through his philosophy and intriguing art series, remains in the mind of Americans and people of the world. His seminal works in the film and design industry still inspire the designers to create arts with the immortal tag of excellence and uniqueness.
