Andy Warhol’s New Bohemia: Factory, Freaks, Films Essay

Andy Warhol is a well known American artist and filmmaker, born in Pittsburgh as Andrew Warhola. He was the leading exponent of the pop art movement and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century. The youngest of three sons, Andrew studied at the prestigious Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1945 along with Balcomb Greene, Robert Lepper, Samuel Rosenberg, and others (Wrbican 1).

He experimented with his name and dropped the final ‘a’ from ‘Warhola’ his family name. He graduated in June 1949 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design. Andy Warhola began his career in 1949 as a commercial artist in New York City. He was commissioned to create a series of show illustrations for Glamour, a fashion magazine. He soon became widely popular as Andy Warhol and his works appeared in many magazines such as Glamour, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. He launched his first art exhibition in 1952 at the Huge Gallery titled “Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Copote” (AWM 1).

Warhol achieved great success as a commercial artist in the 1950s. The heady mixture of bohemian culture spread across the US in the 1960s. His mass produced and recurring visual images are now recognized as symbols of the 1960s gay culture: ‘the silk-screens of Elvis and Troy Donahue (1962-1964); the New York World’s Fair mural of “Thirteen Most Wanted Men” (1964); the films Sleep (1963), Blow-job (1963), My Hustler (1965), Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Flesh (1968). Thesis: The bohemian philosophy of anarchy and individualism was reflected in the figure of Andy Warhol, the most prominent figure of the New York Pop Art scene.

During the early 1950s Warhol came into contact with other cultures and this exposure impacted his later artwork. In the mid-1950s, he was part of a theatre crowd that focused primarily on the plays of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht; Warhol especially admired Brecht’s idea of realism and later applied the philosophy to his work (Lin 1). In the 1960s, Andy Warhol combined all of these early influences and experiences into a style that was distinctly his own and yet allowed others to be involved in the creative process. This came to be known in art history as American Pop art, a movement against the “original” as the bastion of the elite (Lin 1).

Warhol took the Pop Art sensibilities to its furthest extremes, single handedly breaking down the barriers between commercial and serious art. With his work in mass-produced art, documentary style movies, his defining of celebrity as an art form, and the drug- induced, fully documented, orgiastic parties he threw in his famed Factory, Andy Warhol became a major influence on the aesthetics of the decade.

Warhol concentrated on the surface of things, choosing his imagery from the world of commonplace objects such as dollar bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes (Columbia Encyclopedia 50810). He is variously credited with ridiculing and celebrating American middle-class values by erasing the distinction between popular and high culture. Monotony and repetition became the hallmarks of his multi-image, mass-produced silk-screen paintings: for many of these, such as the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, he employed newspaper photographs (Columbia Encyclopedia 50810).

Andy Warhol used a special type of line drawing known as the blotted line technique while he was still a college student. He used it widely in his art in the 1950s. In this method, Warhol made a pencil line drawing on nonabsorbent paper. He then attached the drawing to a second sheet of more absorbent Strathmore paper. He then inked the pencil lines on the original drawing. Then the second sheet of paper was folded along the hinge and the freshly inked lines were transferred by simply pressing the papers together. The process resulted in the stylistically broken and hesitant lines that are characteristic of Andy Warhol’s illustrations.

Warhol often colored his blotted line drawings with watercolor dyes or gold leaf (AWM, 2007a). Warhol’s technique also developed as he worked. Initially Warhol had used hand-cut stencils, rubber stamps, and wooden blocks to make repetitive images in his paintings.

In 1962, his assistant Nathan Gluck suggested using photo-silkscreen printing techniques. In this method, Warhol projected a photographic image onto a screen of treated silk, stretched on a frame and the image was later transferred onto the silk. To make the art more lively, Warhol tried to use inking and overlaps. He found that use of colors and the overlaps led to a variety of images and those images could be produced quickly. Moreover, these images appeared to move with each print. Warhol also could now use other people for printing purposes. Using labor and photo-silk printing technology, Warhol produced a vast amount of art (AWM, 2000).

Warhol’s drawings of the early 1960s have an experimental nature as the artist tried to create a fusion of various elements: photography, collage, written instructions of working studies, and on occasion, pencil and crayon or watercolor. He thus evolved from an artist who drew living things to an artist who identified and drew icons of pop culture such as soup cans, money, newspapers, political figures, and film stars.

Warhol’s drawings from 1968 until 1987 revolved around investigation of stardom. Exhibition curator Mark Francis writes, “For more than 30 years Andy Warhol created a coherent, consistent, and prolific body of drawings in which his deepest fears and his ideals of beauty were plainly and simply outlined” (Walker Art, 1999). When Marilyn Monroe committed suicide on August 4, 1962, Warhol was moved to produce a series of silk-screenings that made him very famous. In these works, he overemphasized her make-up and dyed blonde hair thereby symbolizing glamour and fame. Success in this line made him create images of other celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando (AWM 1).

The Beat Movement originated with a few writers in New York City in the 1950’s. It was a literary movement which emulated many of the ideals of the Bohemia of 19th Century Paris (Kopf et al 1). The beat writers went against the ideals of the mainstream culture, both in their lifestyles and literature. They were a tightly knit group of friends, comparable to Henry Murger and the Water Drinkers. It wasn’t until later on that they became known as a “movement.”

As with 19th Century Bohemia, the dominant culture was initially ambivalent toward the beats, but it later became “hip.” Just like the bohemians of the 19th century, the beats brought their art right into the social arena with them (Kopf et al 1). The seeds of radical change and revolution that happened in America in the 1960s began with the Beats movement. The Beats wrote in reaction to the materialistic, conformist America that they saw developing in the 1940’s. In other words, they wrote against the mainstream, using their art as both an escape from their world and a suggested solution to what they believed ailed it. Drug usage, sexual freedom, and a wandering lifestyle all characterized the beats, and this is why the dominant culture rejected them in the beginning.

Warhol’s endless promotion of camp taste and drug culture at “The Factory” and his personal involvement with the Velvet Underground proved to be an expression of bohemian culture of the 1960s. Bohemian art was the art of a mass culture: popular music, photography and fashion. Bohemians defined the association of genius with tragedy and self destruction. Andy Warhol contributed the most to the transformation whereby the bohemian moved from a character who symbolized the vicissitudes of ‘high art’ to a major influence on mass culture (Wilson 67).

Throughout the 1950s, he became one of the most successful illustrators of his time, and won numerous awards for his work from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. His work was based on photographs and other source images. He also included the delightfully quirky handwriting of his mother Julia in many of his works in this period. In 1956 Warhol traveled around the world for several weeks, visiting many countries in Asia and Europe. In the late 1950s he began to devote more energy to painting.

In 1960, he produced the first of his paintings depicting enlarged comic strip images, including Popeye and Superman (AWP 1). These were initially for use in a windows display at a New York department store. After his commercial art success, Andy became world-famous for his Pop Art.

When Marilyn Monroe committed suicide on August 4, 1962, Warhol was moved to produce a series of silk-screenings that made him very famous. In these works, he overemphasized her make-up and dyed blonde hair thereby symbolizing glamour and fame. Success in this line made him create images of other celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando. He then conducted his most successful exhibition at New York’s Stable Gallery. There, he showcased eighteen images, including Golden Marilyn, 129 Die in Jet, Red Elvis, and several soup can and Coca-Cola bottle pieces. The exhibition made Warhol a celebrated artist (AWM 1).

Despite his success in fine arts, he was also one of the most popular commercial fashion illustrators in New York City. He is best remembered for paintings that mirrored contemporary American life like Coca-cola bottles, televisions cheap advertisements and comic strips. When he found that an artist Roy Lichtenstein worked on similar kinds of comic strip imagery, Warhol tried to change tracks and do different kinds of drawings (AWM 1).

He soon started working on his independent films, some of which carried on the motif of repetition found in his Pop Art such as boredom and time. Among some of his most famous ones are Sleep, which features eight hours of a man sleeping, and Empire, a shot of the Empire State Building from sunrise to sunset. His films later became more complex, involving scripts and soundtracks. The Chelsea Girls is a film about the life at his studio called the Factory.

Warhol had a life-long fascination with Hollywood. In 1962 he began a large series of celebrity portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. He also began his series of “death and disaster” paintings at this time – images of electric chairs, suicides, and car crashes. Andy Warhol opened his famous studio, the Factory, in 1963. During his time in New York, Andy Warhol became friendly with Charles Henri Ford, who gave him the exposure to bohemian culture.

In 1963, Warhol’s Factory Studio soon became a stage on which hustlers and drag queens encountered the New York art world and street life met up with society debutantes and Harvard hipsters. The factory was the center of New York’s bohemian culture, where the most beautiful women, the most influential art-world figures, as well as many celebrities such as Mick Jagger and Lou Reed, congregated. Every evening at the Factory was a drug and sex filled party that lasted until sun rise. According to Kathy Acker, The Factory was a welcoming house for “all those the art world and hippie culture disparaged:.whores, pimps, working girls of all sorts, drug dealers, transsexuals and transvestites”(Acker 62).

This fast paced life style did not slow down Warhol’s artistic output; at the factory, he produced an incredible amount of work, which included paintings, silk screens, sculptures, and films. There, in the words of Wilson (68) “decadence became lifestyle, and voyeurism an art form as art and life merged into one continual performance, reaching new heights when the Velvet Underground created multimedia events at which all boundaries were abandoned” (Wilson 68).

Andy Warhol, developed in particular the relationship between avant-garde and mass culture to an astounding level. His films were mostly experimental; his paintings celebrated the ‘pop’ surface of life, so that the whole American landscape of drive-bys and hoardings became an aesthetic surface (Wilson 68). His words “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” became famous. He managed to combine fame with obscurity so that each intensified the impact of the other. In practice, obscurity was very much a part of Bohemian culture, providing the deeply bohemian themes of self-destruction and failure (Wilson 69).

Edith Sedgwick was a young handsome actress who starred in Andy Warhol’s underground movies. She soon became sucked into a relationship with him where she let herself be controlled by Andy Warhol. She also was trapped into drugs. Both Andy and Edie were androgynous. She was a girl who lived too hard, too fast, too much and too soon and so came to an early, unhappy end. Sedgwick went to The Factory regularly in since 1965 with her friend, Chuck Wein and it was then she was chosen to work in small roles in movies such as Vinyl and Horse.

Later she played major roles in his films such as Poor Little Rich Girl, Kitchen, Beauty No. 2, Outer and Inner Space, Prison, Lupe and Chelsea Girls. Sedgwick wore black leotards, mini dresses, and large chandelier earrings and had her hair cut short and sprayed her hair with silver color. Warhol christened her his “Superstar” and both were photographed together at various social outings (Comenas 1).

However, by late 1965, Sedgwick and Warhol’s relationship deteriorated and they stopped working together. Soon Sedgwick developed a relationship with Bob Dylan and is said to have been the inspiration behind Dylan’s seminal 1966 opus Blonde on Blonde, and the raucous stomper “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”. Sedgwick and Dylan’s relationship ended when Sedgwick found out that Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a secret ceremony – something that she apparently found out from Warhol during an argument at the Gingerman Restaurant in February 1966 (Comenas 1). She became dependent on barbiturates and later died in 1971 as a result of drugs and alcohol.

Bob Dylan was a revolutionary poet and musician who lived in New York during the same period as Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol and his cohorts at his famous Factory were defining and creating “Pop Art,” breaking down barriers between art and everyday life, at the same time Bob Dylan was forging blues, country, folk, and rock music with a poetic sensibility that would influence most forms of popular music in the coming decade. Andy Warhol made an experimental film with Paul Caruso titled The Bob Dylan story.

What was unique about Warhol’s artwork is that it focused not on the end result, but on the creative processes that produced the work of art. Reflecting this philosophy was the artist’s use of the silkscreen, a process that allowed multiple identical images to be produced by anyone: Warhol liked to have his friends create prints using his silkscreens. Most of Warhol’s creative work at this time took place in his studio, which he called “the Factory”.

This work, done between 1962 and 1964, ranged from portraits of friends and celebrities to car crashes to electric chairs to consumer products. Perhaps the most famous of his Factory work – consumer product images of Campbell’s Soup, Brillo boxes, green stamps, and Coca-Cola – distinctly point to Warhol’s fascination with America’s growing identification with brand-name labels (Lin 1). In 1962 Warhol had his first show in the Stable Gallery. It was a huge success, widely reported in the press and fully sold out.

From 1966 onward, Andy Warhol concentrated on making films, initially intent on studying the lives of the people surrounding him. The first films for which he gained recognition were shot between 1963 and 1964, a total of eight hours, with the titles of Sleep, Kiss, Haircut, Eat, Blow Job, and Empire. His films carried his philosophy like his paintings. They focused more on the creative process. The subjects were mostly ordinary people (Lin 1). In The Chelsea Girls (1966), a seven-hour voyeuristic look into hotel rooms, he used projection techniques that constituted a startling divergence from established methods.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967), came into the studio and shot Warhol in the chest, apparently because of a play she had written. He recovered from the near-fatal shooting after a five-hour operation. While recuperating he painted a large series of portraits of Happy Rockefeller, the wife of the Governor of New York (Wrbican 1).

It was Warhol’s masterstroke to realize that the best method of electrifying the old-master portrait tradition with sufficient energy to absorb the real, living world was through the photographic image. When Warhol took a photographic silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe’s head, set it on gold paint, and let it float on high in a timeless, spaceless heaven he was creating, in effect, a secular saint for the 1960s. And when he reproduced the same incorporeal divinity not as a single unit but as a nonstop series, rolling off an invisible press in endless multiples, he offered a kind of religious broadsheet for popular consumption. By accepting the photograph directly into the domain of pictorial art as the actual base for the image on canvas, Warhol was able to portray the visual and moral network of modern life.

Andy Warhol’s paintings are deceptively simple as his paintings. The paintings are of canned, commercial images, whether Campbell Soup, Marilyn Monroe, or of scenes of destruction and death, an auto crash, an electric chair. The image always has a context and a history before Warhol uses it: he takes the second-hand or the familiar and presents it freshly, with immediacy. His paintings showcase the essential symbols of daily life drained of their force through repetition. Hence, they evoke powerful feelings in the social consciousness of the individual. There is no image so simple that it means only one thing, no image so familiar that it has lost its meaning (Glueck 19). The impact grows through repetition; the forms dissolve into patterns on the canvas, and then regroup in fresh recognition.

That Warhol could paint simultaneously Warren Beatty and electric chairs, Troy Donahue and race riots, Marilyn Monroe and fatal car crashes, may seem to indicate a perversely cool and passive personality. But on reflection, on is likely to realize that this numb, voyeuristic view of contemporary life, in which the grave and the trivial, the fashionable and the horrifying, blandly coexist as passing spectacles, is a deadly accurate mirror of a commonplace experience in modern art and life.

Andy Warhol’s work compelled viewers to see the moral truth and the falsehood of conventional moral pieties. The facts of modern life are presented through pictures. These artistic expressions were often more powerful than the louder screams of expressionist psychology.

Culturally, Andy Warhol exploited his special relationship with food, and organized ritual lunches for highly selective groups of people, each of which was strictly staged. He brought very famous and glamorous people together with a few less famous and glamorous people who very much wanted to be part of fame and glamour and with simple food and inexpensive wine would persuade them to have their portraits done. It became a multi-million business.

At the end of 1974 the price of a Warhol portrait was $25,000. That was actually the price for the first portrait. If he thought he could sell more to a client, he would do a second which he sold for $15,000, a third for 10,000, a fourth for 5,000, and so on. The additional works were very popular among art dealers. Thus Warhol became an artist who conducted business according to very strict marketing principles, places products at well chosen values, and as a consequence saw the value of his work increase. Andy Warhol is a good example of an artist who created great economic value. He was also a fabulous queen, a fan of prurience and pornography, and a great admirer of the male body.

Much has been speculated about Andy Warhol’s sex life. He featured both men and women in his artistic endeavors, and his entourage was a mingling of the two sexes. Most people tend to think Warhol was gay, and he did have boyfriends. However, it is a mystery as to whether or not he actually was intimate with these men; Warhol’s attitude was more asexual than homosexual.

Andy Warhol later diversified into several art forms and proved himself as a talented painter, sculptor, graphic artist, filmmaker, music producer, author and publisher. But behind each one of these roles, it was his extraordinarily creative drawing skills that laid the foundation for success. Towards the mid-sixties, he began working with the band The Velvet Underground. He broadened his activities into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured the rock and roll band The Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground went on to become one of the most influential rock bands in history.

To the music of the band he orchestrated an interactive show consisting of images and lights and called it The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The mixed media showcase created an international sensation when it opened at the DOM nightclub in New York City. It was an onslaught on the senses, and it described in music and art the feeling of young America.

Throughout the 1970s, Warhol frequently socialized with celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote, both of whom had been important early subjects in his art. He started to receive dozens-and soon hundreds-of commissions for painted portraits from wealthy socialites, music and film stars, and other clients. The 1970s was also a period of experimentation for Warhol. He made 3 versions of a sculpture called Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall) for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970 (Wrbican 1).

From the 1970s onward, Warhol continued to produce a prolific number of paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings: Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, Camouflage, and many more, culminating in his series of Last Supper paintings, which were shown in Milan in early 1987 (Wrbican 1).

Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987, due to complications following surgery to remove his gall bladder. In 1988, a ten-day auction of his enormous estate of art and antiques raised over 20 million dollars for The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Andy Warhol Museum was announced in 1989, and opened in Pittsburgh in 1994. For almost two decades, Andy Warhol had maintained the position of an infamous media icon, notorious for his parties and respected for his artistic taste; he backed young and upcoming artists, lending his support to the development of modern art in America.

He had lived for 58 years, helping to develop a new scene for American art and a new ideology in the artist’s lexicon. Andy Warhol’s impact on the art world cannot be overlooked, and his influence lingers to this day, from Brain-juice.com’s soup can logo to the cinematic techniques behind The Blair Witch Project. Thus Andy Warhol was the single person who brought about the transformation of bohemian culture from an individualistic perspective to a mass cultural form.

Works Cited

Acker, Kathy (1989). “Blue Valentine” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray. British Film Institute Publication. London.

AWM (2007a). Andy Warhol’s Methods and Techniques. Web.

AWM (2007b). Andy Warhol: Life and Art. Web.

AWP (Andy Warhol Posters) (2008). Andy Warhol Posters ‘n’ Pop. Web.

Comenas, Gary (2008). Edie Sedgwick. Web.

Glueck, Grace (1964). Art Notes: Boom? Review of exhibition at Stable Gallery. New York Times. p. 19.

Hopf, Courtney; Kogan, Leslie and Brown, Rachel (2001). Beat Culture: A Later Manifestation of Bohemia. Web.

Lin, Amy (2008). Andy Warhol. Web.

Sherer, Danielle (2000). Gallery Attendants Put a New Face on The Andy Warhol Museum. Carnegie Magazine. Web.

The Columbia Encyclopedia (2007). Warhol, Andy. The Columbia Encyclopedia. Sixth Edition. Columbia University Press. New York. 2007.

Wilson, Elizabeth (2002). Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts. Tauris Parke Paperbacks.

Wrbican, Matt (2008). American Masters: Andy Warhol. Wrbican. Web.