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Andy Warhol
Sidewalk, 1983
M.O.C.A. Eight by Eight Portfolioserigraph 1/250
29 x 42 in. (73.66 x 160.68 cm)
Gift of the Gordon F. Hampton Foundation, through Wesley K. Hampton, Roger K. Hampton, and Katharine H. Shenk
© 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York. Reproduction, including downloading of Warhol works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Andy Warhol (American 1928-1978)
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola the son of Czechoslovakian immigrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. He studied technical drawing and design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Warhol met and became friends with fellow student Philip Pearlstein both of whom moved to New York in 1949. Warhol worked as a commercial illustrator throughout the 1950’s and his designs appeared in several fashion magazines, including his drawing of ladies shoes published in Glamour magazine.
Warhol soon began moving into the world of fine art, and by the 1960s gained recognition within the New York Pop art scene. In 1962, he opened his new studio called the Factory that marked an incredibly productive era in which Warhol produced both paintings and several films. By this time he had already developed his iconic look of bleached hair and dark sunglasses and sought out new methods of art making. He was producing silkscreen paintings very quickly in a very machine-like, assembly line fashion. He at one point even stated that he wanted to be “a machine.”
Warhol appropriated images from the American Pop culture of the 1960s that served as inspiration for works like the Campbell Soup Cans and the Marilyn Monroe series. In these works he often repeats the images several times echoing the over stimulation of mass media. He later moves to the Death and Disaster Series repeating the images from car accidents, electric chairs, as well as the race riots of the 1960s. Warhol uses the same technique of repetition echoing the saturation of reproduced images in mass media. The decade came to a tragic end for Warhol when the writer Valerie Solanis a frequent visitor to the Factory shot Warhol in 1968.
By the 1970s Warhol had achieved much fame and success as an artist. He began to take on portrait commissions from celebrities like Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, and Diana Ross. Warhol was not only depicting celebrities, but at this point he himself had reached celebrity status exhibiting in numerous museums and galleries. He began the publication Interview magazine and published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back again.) Aside from the commissioned paintings, he also made the series of Maos, Skulls, and Shadows. His career continued into the 1980s and is seen as a major influence in the emergence of young artists like Jean Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel.
Andy Warhol died unexpectedly after gallbladder surgery in 1987. His will requested that his estate was to be used to start a foundation for the advancement of visual arts, and with that The Andy Warhol Foundation was established. The Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective of his work in 1989, and in May of 1994 The Andy Warhol Museum opened.
