Andy Warhol The Legacy

Introduction
I could say that the first time a friend told me about Andy Warhol and the idea of Pop Art I was quite sceptical, I didnt quite know what to expect and I wasnt able understand his enthusiasm towards this new and apparently superficial movement. Maybe it was just my pessimistic personality or maybe this is what the movement inspires. I am still trying to figure this out. But I still have some optimism left to believe the answer is easier to found that I thought, maybe it is surrounding us every day and we dont even know it. How come? This is what I will try to figure out in the process of elaborating this project on one of the most controversial and fascinating artist I know. The biggest surprise after that conversation I treated with such superficiality, as my view on the subject was, came when the same individual sent me some pictures later on that day. He told me that those were some of the most famous, valuable and controversial works of art ever made and for many, they epitomised all that they detested about modern art. Well, that last affirmation caught my attention for sure. And when I clicked on the first image he sent me, it struck me, this image was incredibly familiar to me, as well as most of the others. That is the moment I realised I knew more about this Andy Warhol than I thought. I had been surrounded by his art all this time and I didnt even know it, until then... That artist, Andy Warhol, is as famous and controversial as the images he created. Warhol was the one who predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, and then spent his life making it come true, exploiting the media to transform himself, and his eccentric, beautiful entourage, into celebrities. Some even say he heralded the consumer-led, celebrity-driven world we live in today. His influence really does seem to be everywhere, from reality TV, to Facebook, to magazines, even to the way music is performed. And his images are incredibly familiar, after all, Andy Warhol's the man who painted Campbell's tomato soup and also canonised the movie star Marilyn Monroe. But just because his work is so widely reproduced and he's so incredibly famous, does that mean he's actually any good?

Chapter 1 My childhood home was the most terrible place I had ever been.
Today, Andy Warhol is associated with glamour, celebrity and decadence, but his childhood was very different. His parents were poor Slovakian immigrants and Andrew Warhola grew up in a slum ghetto during the Great Depression of the '30s, when Pittsburgh was a dirty, industrial, steelmaking city. Food was often scarce and Andy's mum would sometimes make soup out of water and ketchup. A tin of Campbell's tomato soup was a real treat. At an early age he showed a wonderful talent for drawing. Due to an illness at the age of 8 he was confined to bed , this kept him off school for nearly a year. It left him with the poor skin and thin hair that always embarrassed him, and a shyness he never overcame. He became an anxious social outcast, and almost never left his home. His mother, Julia, used to provide him with magazines, colouring-in books, comics and cutout paper dolls. It's almost like the kitchen became his first artist's studio, with his mum as his assistant. She would encourage him to make collages and drawings and she would reward him with a chocolate bar each time he finished one. All this influenced his work later in life. Besides doing art, the only other escape from the ghetto were the visits to the church. He was fascinated with the he golden screens with their Byzantine icons. This remained a rich image of his poor childhood. It seems to me that Andy's two childhood passions, religion and the movie

stars in his magazines, later fused in his art where celebrities became icons and the objects of worship. All the lonely months Andy spent in the tenements with his colouring books and collages paid off. In 1945 Warhol won a place at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he majored in painting and design and received a rather unconventional artistic education. While in school, he worked parttime as a window dresser for a number of department stores, making his earliest contacts with what would become the principal environment of his activity, namely the world of consumption and advertising. A week after his graduation he escaped from the Pittsburgh ghetto and moved to New York.

Chapter 2 It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
Andy moved to New York in 1949, aged 21, with only a small suitcase and some samples of his work. His ultimate goal was to become a famous artist but in the meantime he had to survive somehow so he began to make a living as an commercial illustrator. With almost no money in his pocket, Andy moved in the Lower East Side into a dingy tenement building. He then started to make his way thru the city looking for jobs carrying a portfolio of his drawings in a tatty brown paper bag. Andy's persistence began to pay off when Glamour magazine asked him to illustrate a feature called Success is a Job in New York. They liked his delicate drawings, with their quirky, charming figures and modern look. Though he started to drop the a from his name occasionally during his college days in Pittsburgh, he made it more official by signing his first commissioned illustrations, Andy Warhol. For many years there has been much speculation regarding just why he changed his name but it simply proved easier to say. But further success didnt come immediately for Andy Warhol. He started to spend most of his time in a coffee-shop called Serendipity as this was a

popular place for all his favourite movie stars; Marilyn Monroe even had her own table here. The owner of the coffee-shop was one of the first people in New York who recognised his talent as he went there everyday showing him his rejections. This became the place of his first exhibition , sold for 25 dollars which he split with the owner. Andy's quiet demeanour masked an insatiable ambition, which along with his talent as a commercial illustrator, soon got him noticed. He started to receive illustration work from all of the major fashion magazines, including Glamour, Vogue, and Harpers Bazaar. Andys blotted line technique caught the eyes of numerous art directors. Throughout the 1950s he was prolific in illustrating fashion ads, books, record albums and many other promotional items. The advertising world of the 1950s groomed him well for his venture into the art world of the 60s. It's funny how popular his retro fifties style still is today. You see his influence everywhere, on cards, wrapping paper, or even on kids' books like Madonna's The English Roses. But even though he started to make more and more money his dream remained the same.

Chapter 3 I never think that people die. They just go to department stores
For Andys work to be taken seriously as art, rather than illustration, it had to comment on the world around him and make people look at it differently. Artists have always painted things from their everyday lives, and what Andy Warhol saw was America in the middle of 50s consumer revolution so he started to create art that reflected the mass-produced world. This is how he becam the champion of a new movement called Pop Art. What Pop And this is how 32 cans of soup made it onto the walls of America's most important modern art museum. When they were first shown, most people thought they were a joke, but they really marked the beginning of his career as a pop artist. The bright colours, the crisp, mechanical technique, the presentation of a series of nearly identical images, they were all things Andy would play with again and again. Like so much of his later work these paintings were about capitalism, the consumer society really, they're about us. He was so drawn to doing this thing of the repetition because our media, with all the media that we have today, it is like

repetition. To me, it seems like he really was looking forward and foretelling what was going to happen.

Andy had begun a revolution, and what could now be classified as art would never be the same again. If we needed any evidence that Andy Warhol shaped the modern world, this is it. Today, nearly 50 years after his glory days as a pop artist, his work has moved out of the gallery and into our everyday lives. It's so strong, so reproducible, that it appears everywhere. With Andy Warhol, high art became a brand. His art about modern consumer culture had become part of it

Chapter 4 In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes

After he'd taken the art world by storm, Andy decided he wanted to become a star on a much bigger stage. Through his art, Andy Warhol was exploring the power of branding and marketing and he later realised that to achieve his dreams of celebrity he also had to rebrand and market himself. He needed to create a persona that will help people remember him as well as his art. So he started to put on what he called his "Andy Suit", which was an act he performed in public for the rest of his life. Over night, he totally reinvented himself into the iconic, fashionable Andy Warhol everybody knows. He also started to wear loads of different wigs that he customised himself fact that he never actually admitted and

started to give more and more strange interviews. He cemented his image into people's mentalities by inspiring an aura of mystery. In 1964, Warhol opened his own art studio, a large silver-painted warehouse known simply as "The Factory." The Factory quickly became one of New York City's premier cultural hotspots, the scene of lavish parties attended by the city's wealthiest socialites and celebrities. Warhol, who clearly relished his celebrity, became a fixture at infamous New York City nightclubs like Studio 54 and Max's Kansas City. Commenting on celebrity fixation, his own and that of the public at large, Warhol observed, "more than anything people just want stars." Nicky Haslam, a celebrity knew Andy in the Sixties and often visited the Silver Factory said: He did have that sort of aura that conferred a kind of genuine happiness on to you that made you feel famous for 15 minutes. It was like being sort of touched by the god of fame.

The

silkscreen technique

In July 1962, Andy discovered the process of silk screening. This technique uses a specially prepared section of silk as a stencil, allowing one silkscreen to create similar patterns multiple times, Andy Warhol would use this technique for the rest of his life. He immediately began making paintings of celebrities.
In August 1962, movie star Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose, and Andy

immediately decided to make a series of portraits of her. He used the exciting new silkscreen technique which he'd discovered earlier that summer. The 24 pictures of Marilyn would combine two of his favourite themes - death and celebrity. At first glance, Marilyn looks incredibly beautiful, even precious, like one of the gold-leafed religious icons that Andy saw in church as a boy. But something isn't right. The silkscreen allowed him to offset the layers of paint, so the edges smudge and blur, creating an eerie, haunting quality. The colourful mask, covering the colourless photograph, is echoing Marilyn's glittering media-created image that hid the profound sadness beneath. The colours of her eyelids and lips look like make-up applied by a child. Marilyns face is distorted, just as the media distorted her image. Theres a sadness which chimes with our knowledge of her early death. In the Marilyns, the photograph is always the same, but the effect changes from tragic to electrifying, from glamour to innocence, reflecting the many masks that Marilyn wore to hide the real her. As well as celebrity, the Marilyns are also about death, which you can see in this other, haunting version. It fades, from colour to black and white, almost as if she's washed away. It's like the transition of Marilyn Monroe from this life to the next. Death and celebrity are still constantly explored in modern art

Chapter 5 I nevere use that anymore, my new line is: In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.
In the summer of 1963, Andy bought his first hand-held movie camera, and started shooting films, and not long afterwards he made his first screen tests - three-minute film portraits of Factory regulars, and beautiful and famous visitors. People like Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dali, everyone who was anyone in the early '60s in New York. The only thing that Andy would tell them was to stare directly at the camera. Whatever else they did was up to them. Using film to make art was another important leap that Andy made, a further break from traditional art. Andy discovered that he could manufacture celebrity,and his experiments in film proved that he no longer had to restrict himself to paintings.

In 1965, Andy had announced that he was going to leave painting behind altogether and concentrate on a whole raft of different projects. In the same year, he began to manage Lou Reed and John Cale's band, The Velvet Underground. And this is the classic banana record sleeve that he designed for their album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which was released in 1967.As producer for the Velvet Underground, Andy said he wanted to create the biggest discotheque in the world, combining music,film and performance.The band played with his movies projected onto walls and his beautiful entourage dancing. Encouraging them to let go and experiment with their sound, Warhol created a blueprint for a new style of multimedia music performance. They inspired musicians to really let loose with wild and outlandish performances. You could say that the whole punk rock movement in the '70s owed a massive debt to Warhol's Factory scene as well.

Chapter 6 Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.

In June 3 1968, extremist Valerie Solanas, sole follower of the SCUM manifest, arrived at the Factory with two guns hidden in a brown paper bag and tried to kill Andy, by shooting him 3 times. After the incident, Andy only commented: I was only at the wrong place, at the right time. But the truth is, his was profoundly affected by it , after it he was transformed himself as an artist, he smartened up his entourage and became more interested in making as much money as he possibly could. For the next 20 years, everything became business. Andy became a professional party-goer, a shameless stalwart of the celebrity circuit, he had a TV chat show, and joined a model agency, became court painter to the rich and famous, and appeared in everything from Japanese TV commercials to pop videos. And he even launched a celebrity magazine called Interview becoming the the precursor to celebrity gossip magazines like Hello, OK!. It's ironic that, throughout his career, Andy had been fascinated by violent death. He'd even created an entire series exploring the subject, known as the Death and Disaster paintings. One of them shows a gruesome tabloid photograph of a car crash repeated 14 times in which you can even see a corpse slumped in the passenger seat. It's horrible, and completely at odds with the jaunty orange background. So was he being heartless? In my opinion he was just being honest. He was trying to tell us something fundamental about our times. The power of this

painting is in the repetition and by doing this, Andy wanted to imitate what he saw happening in newspapers and on television, that unending flow of news reports covering all sorts of catastrophes, not just car crashes, but plane disasters and suicides.

Chapter 7 Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.
In 1986, Andy created quite a sum of self portraits, that lots of people described as death masks. Warhols last series of self-portraits are among the most iconic, moving and ultimately profound works of his entire career. Among the very last paintings he executed before he did indeed suffer a premature and unexpected death - following complications that arose after a routine operation on his gall bladder in February 1987 this series of self-portraits have consequently gained a prescience and an uncanny sense of timeliness that has done much to reinforce the legend of Warhol as a modern day seer. The terrifying oracle' as Calvin Tomkins once described him, who made visible what was happening in some part to us all, seems here, in these works, to be foreseeing intimations of his own death.

The end
For me, Andy Warhol redefined the role of the artist , genuinely changing art forever. He told us that, something like a portrait can tell us so much about ourselves, about our own obsession, our desires, about our media saturated age. about our media-saturated age, He took things, really banal, humble objects, like a can of tomato soup or a Brillo box, and made it question the very nature of art. He took art out of the gallery and into the world around us, into so many different fields like music or film, publishing even, and in doing that, he freed up other artists to do exactly the same. I think the that perhaps weve moved beyond the idea that artists can only make paintings or artists have to be sincere, they have to suffer. Artists can now, thanks to Warhol, inhabit a whole different realm of activities and personas, and that's what we wanted to look at. I think that's Andy Warhol's indisputable legacy. He threw open the doors, and now, in art, anything goes. He may indeed have sold out in later life and bought into the celebrity circus, and you can even question his motivations, but there's no denying the incredible impact his work has had on our modern world.