Andy Warhol – Famous Work

Andy Warhol said it himself: “Art is anything you can get away with.” And he got away with making the most ordinary objects we see in everyday life beautiful and intriguing. He made groceries, common objects, and familiar faces into some of the most recognizable and iconic art works.

His Campbell’s Can of Soup series is among his most famous work. He started the series by making “portraits” of each of the 32 varieties of Campbell’s soups against a white background. Sometimes he used stencils and other times he used pencil, ink, crayons, acrylic and oil paints. He painted enormous still lifes or sad-looking soups with torn labels. Often times he multiplied the can image with the silkscreen method. One of the most famous pieces in the series is 100 Cans multiplying Beef Noodle soup 100 times.

Not only did his subject choice influence modern art but so did his most common silkscreen technique. With the silkscreen method he would start with a photo. He would then blow it up and transfer it in glue onto silk, and then toll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. Using this silkscreen method, you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was simple, quick, and chancy. That is why he loved it. But he also said once that the reason he paints this way is because he wants to be a machine: an art machine.

The primitive printing technique was the method for the next phase of his well-known pieces. The Disasters was a series of silkscreen pieces taken from newspaper clippings about horrific events usually involving death. One of his most famous among this phase was the Tunafish Disasters, the story of two women who were poisoned with tainted tuna. This piece was almost the exact black and white image that appeared in the original article. It even included the exact text from the news of the two deaths.

During this artistic phase he also reproduced images depicting plane crashes, suicides (horrific suicides like a man jumping off a building), car accidents, and other images of death such as an electric chair and guns. He was known for repeating the same image on the canvas illustrating the commonality of these types of events in everyday life. He also played with color to bring an even more haunting image to the viewer.

His fascination with both death and beautiful things led him to his next series, the Marilyns. The Marilyn series was a reproduction of the famous promotional image for the 1953 film “Niagara.” He made the photo into a silkscreen and screened a single image of her face onto small canvases. He then multiplied her image in Six Marilyns, Marilyn Twenty Times, and One Hundred Marilyns.

In some pieces he just painted her ruby lips and blonde hair with contrasting skin colors. In another Marilyn, he took multiple images of her lips, one of her most sensual and familiar features, creating a sort of kissing machine. For the famous Gold Marilyn Monroe, he painted the entire canvas with gold paint with a single picture of her face in the silkscreen depicting her as a goddess of sensuality.

A turning point in Warhol’s career was when Architect Philip Johnson, director of the Architecture and Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased Gold Marilyn Monroe for the museum. This gave Warhol great credence in the art world especially when a panel of critics, curators, and art historians saw his Gold Marilyn in the museum. That day they named the new modern art movement “Pop Art” short for popular, with Warhol as a pioneer.
Through his career, he went on to do portraits of many other well-known figures such as Mao, Jackie Kennedy, Liz Taylor, and Dolly Parton. Even his self-portraits became famous for his unique imagery and conceptual style that changed the face of modern art.

The young Andrew Warhola of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, never would have guessed he would become the world famous Pop Artist of the 60s and 70s Andy Warhol.

After a childhood of honing his artistic talent, he studied fine arts at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Even in college he did things his own way. For one of his final projects, just to be different, he cut a painting into four parts and submitted it as four separate assignments. His originality cost him his enrollment that semester. After a summer of painting the customers at the family fruit stand, he showed the portraits to the faculty and was readmitted to Carnegie Tech.

After graduating, he moved from Pittsburgh to New York with his friend Philip Pearlstein. The move marked the starting point of an entirely new existence: Andrew Warhola died and from his ashes Andy Warhol rose. In New York, he worked as a successful freelance commercial artist for well-known magazines as Glamour, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Bazaar. He also worked for retail stores such as Tiffany & Co., Bergdorf Goodman, and Bonwit Teller; and most notably, for the I. Miller shoe company. It was his work on the shoe ads that won him prestige and financial security.

His work began to obtain certain recognition. For most of his work in this period, he used the blotted-line technique. He accidentally discovered this technique as a student when, by chance, he applied some blotting paper onto one of his ink drawings: the resulting impression fascinated him because it looked like a reproduction.

In 1960, he wanted to change his profession from a commercial artist to a serious fine art painter. Among his first efforts were works depicting comic strips characters in oil. He discovered that another young painter, Roy Lichtenstein, was working on the same idea but with better results. Warhol quickly abandoned the comic idea.

After the Bonwit Teller department stores used five of Warhol’s paintings as backdrops for its window displays, his fine art painting career started. It was then that he debuted some of his most famous and recognizable themes: the Campbell’s Soup Cans, The Disasters, and portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

His career exploded in the early 60s and he gained credence in the art world after his famous Gold Marilyn Monroe was purchased for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This is when Warhol was named one of the leading artists in the new art movement known as “Pop Art,” short for popular art.

In 1964, he moved his studio to a loft in a warehouse on East 47th Street, the original Factory. Warhol became a leader of a factory of art-workers churning out works as from an assembly line. The Factory itself became a work of art as it was transformed with theatrical lighting, aluminum foil and silver paint. It was more than a studio. It became the trendiest place for the “in” crowd to gather in New York’s cultural universe.

The year 1966 marked the beginning of his close collaboration with the musical group The Velvet Underground as the two staged multimedia “happenings” in New York and California. Two years later, the radical feminist Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in an assassination attempt. Severely wounded, Warhol spent almost two months in the hospital.

After the ‘60s Warhol’s output skyrocketed in virtually every artistic field. Soon his fame began to eclipse that of his celebrity portrait subjects. His work in the 1970s and 1980s was more expressive and visually more complex, adding vitality to the coldness of the silkscreen medium.

His career experienced one final twist as he turned to more abstract works as his Oxidation Paintings, Shadows, Egg Paintings, and Threads. On February 22, 1987, following a routine gallbladder surgery, he died in a New York hospital at age 58. His death not only marked the end of a great artist but also the end of an era.