Introduction
The Post-Modernist Movement of pop art and culture in the latter half of the twentieth century was a revolutionary movement and it was started by the American artist Andy Warhol’s very ‘mundane’ looking paintings of Campbell’s soup cans which were exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Also called the ‘Prince of Pop’, Andy Warhol was a quirky but genuinely gifted artist with other feathers in his caps: A film-maker, a photographer, print-maker, musician and writer. (Williams, 59)
Biography
Early life
Born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as the youngest sibling, he had developed a taste for drawing, coloring, cutting and pasting pictures since childhood, encouraged and aided by his mother who was an artist. Even though he contracted the deadly St. Vitus’ disease which upsets the nervous system and causes pink blotches on the skin, he made up for missing elementary school by improving his artistic abilities while in bed-rest.
After high school, he chose his path by studying art at the Carnegie Museum. Always a bit of a loner, he loved watching movies and was enamored of celebrities which later shows up in his paintings and photos of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali. Andy Warhol graduated with a major in pictorial design in 1949 with a revolutionary technique of art known as the blotted-line technique which would influence his style of painting immensely.
Profession
Next, he moved to New York and chose commercial art as his profession, becoming very popular for commercial advertisements for illustrious names like Tiffany and I. Miller. He soon shifted to the emerging style of Pop Art, begun in England in mid-1950. This kind of art included making faithful representations of everyday items, to symbolize the increasing consumerism and materialism of the era. Andy liked this trend and started out painting Coke cans and then made his masterpieces— A realistic painting of a dollar note and Campbell’s soup cans, which were his favorite item for lunch.
Fame
After his historically famous exhibition of the 32 Campbell soup cans sold for $1000 each, there was no looking back for Andy Warhol. In 1962, he developed another artistic technique called the Silkscreen method which used a piece of silk as a stencil so as to allow reproductions of similar images on different images, a style of pop art. This enabled Andy to take his art to a larger level. HE soon became famous of his paintings and his photographs of celebrities and in between 1963-1968, he also turned to films, making almost 60 avant-garde movies. His work and associates were always centered on his workshop called ‘The Factory’. (Colacello, 174)
Photography
According to William Ganis’s article on Andy Warhol’s photography, Andy Warhol became publicly acknowledged as a photographer in 1985, when he appeared on ‘The Love Boat’ and started taking random photos of the guests on the boat. His photo series called ‘Fashion’ came out in 1979-80 where he had photographed models and beauties in bathing suits. Andy Warhol is primarily known as an artist and a film maker but very few know that he invented and popularized Polaroid photography and took almost 66,000 classic photographs which are valued at over $80 million posthumously. His most famous photographs include the Red Elvis (1962) and the Orange Car Crash (1964). (Williams, 225)
Andy Warhol was obsessed with documentation of his life and work in ‘The Factory’, of the celebrities he met or of the habits of his associates. Thus, his films also are based on the theme of voyeurism. He has been known to say: “A picture means I know where I am every minute….it’s a visual diary” (Liberatore, 1).
Andy Warhol’s Polaroid’s
Much of Andy’s silkscreen paintings have focused around photography as the Pop Art movement needed realistic, pictorial representations of objects or personalities. Earlier, his idea of images came from advertisement and newspapers, like his Marilyn Monroe series or his Elvis Photographs are actually representations of their photographs circulating in the media. This sparked a lot of debate about the authenticity of his photography. Thus, Andy Warhol adopted the Silkscreen technique, before moving on to Polaroid photography.
Andy Warhol believed in the mechanical, impersonal nature of photography which was non-traditional and was moving against the work of Abstract Expressionists, hailing to the modern age of painting. He experimented with repeated imagery in different colors and set-ups so as to heighten the sense of realism, reject any abstraction in art and also obscure the blurring lines between high art and the ‘lower’ forms of commercial art, like the images of advertising and commerce, which became a tradition of post-modernist painters and sculptors, who increasingly focused on the hyper-real or the mundane aspects of commercialized life. The inexpensive camera was the best medium for this objective gaze.
Warhol’s journey as a photographer begins in 1962 when he got his first Polaroid camera. He begins with the dispassionate anatomical images of male nudes and especially buttocks. In 1970-71, he developed his photography with the Big Shot Polaroid camera which allowed him to take close-ups and it came with an in-built flash. Warhol’s photography focuses on portraits and he developed a particular process for such photographs. The sitter was brought to ‘The Factory’ and Andy would interview the sitter and if it was a woman, then he would apply white make-up to her face like a Kabuki theatre actor and then wrap a cloth around her chest, giving a classical look under the flash. After the Polaroid had been taken, it was transferred to the acetates which would later be used to make silkscreens. As for male sitters, he would use the sitter’s hands to strike a pose, to hold a cigar or a cigarette, to enhance the personality.
After taking the Polaroid’s, Warhol would follow the careful procedure of listening to the sitter’s tapes and choose the images which he would later have rephotographed in 35mm, then have them printed as 8×10 inch acetates which would finally be enlarged to 40×40 inches as preparation for making a silkscreen. His assistants had been directed to alter the image at all stages. The process of changing a Polaroid shot to a silkscreen included the magic touch of Andy Warhol who mystically changed the ordinary to the artistic. (Hughes,276)
A particular trait of Warhol’s photography was his concentration on the face when he was photographing people. David Bourdon, a biographer of Warhol, states that Warhol’s portraits were always larger-than-life sized faces which seemed to be an aggrandizement of his sitter’s egos. Probably, this suited Warhol’s famous saying- “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” (Harris, 2007, 217). His biographer has labeled him a “court painter” to international celebrities. Warhol had photographed celebrities like John Lennon, Truman Capote, Jean Michel Basquiat, Georgia O’Keefe, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.
Portraits
He was also famous for his series of portraits of sports celebrities and athletes, shown in a curiously formal manner by Warhol who photographed them with uniforms and their equipment. However, Warhol failed to grasp their iconic status and their idolatry as he was not interested in their arena of professional sports. His shots include sports personalities like Tom Seaver, Pele, Willie Shoemaker, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Muhammad Ali, the last person being able to capture some command over the camera.
Techniques
Warhol showed his sitter in tight close-ups and a flattened relief technique which would help in magnifying the sitter’s personality and help in distancing Warhol, this would help in drawing a line between idolization and absolute desecration of the iconic personas. Another interesting fact is proved form this; Warhol’s secret belief was that he too should have been a movie star and thus, he chooses the Polaroid form for celebrities, it was the most glamorous. Traditionally, portraits were meant to be a document or a metaphor about the person. Warhol subverts the tradition by making his portraits into impersonal designs and talismans of someone’s existence, however, with no message or moral behind the surface. He would also stitch up different photographs belonging to different time periods.
From the 1980’s, Warhol focuses on photographing commercial objects like high heeled women’s shoes and Brillo boxes. In 1980-81, he also did a series of photographs on the American Icons like Dracula, Howdy Doody, Uncle Sam and items like cheeseburgers, soup cans and comic strips, returning to his Pop Art days. (Williams, 88)
Sense of dramatization
Warhol’s dramatized; self-conscious portraits are also part of his photographic skills. He always used props like a wild blond wig, a boxer’s gloves or a skull perched on his head to glorify his position as artist but mask his real identity. He never relaxes in front of the camera and tries to ironically glance at his difference from his surroundings. His series of self- portraits also include the photos of himself taking the shots of some personality or other people at work in his studio.
Thus, the Polaroid is central to the idea of Warhol’s content and style of his work. Though they were meant to be seen as a medium of Pop Art, the Polaroid’s have come to take on an independent identity, as a neutral, tape-recording device where the observer has mechanically given directions for the portrait. Many art critics have tried to decipher Warhol’s personality or a hidden metaphor or symbol in his photographs and paintings however, Warhol famously commented, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (Warhol, Michelson and Buchloh, 71).
Experimentation
His Polaroid’s actually go beyond this statement as Andy was always experimenting with the representation of the photos he took. He spent hours trying to relate to his sitters and try to reconstruct a piece of their identity, as seen by his photographer’s eye, in the silkscreen portraits that he made ultimately. Thus, his photographs became metaphors of consumerism, the desire for consumption and voyeuristic distancing, and all elements of postmodern life. Even in his wild self-portraits, he is caught in his desire to be a celebrity. Andy Warhol was a very keen artist but also an acute businessman as he confesses himself- “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art” (Williams, 223).
Death and after
A historic and critical event was the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, when his protégé, feminist art critic and actress in his film, I, A Man. Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in his studio, ‘The Factory’, when he was with art critic and curator Mario Amaya. She had been refused a script on that day from ‘The Factory’ and so she shot at Warhol and Amaya. Warhol was critically injured and doctors even had to cut open his chest and massage his heart to revive him. This incident made him very weak physically. It had a deep impact on him psychologically and influenced his last pieces of work. (Hughes, 117)
Conclusion
Andy Warhol died in New York City from a gallbladder surgery post-operative cardiac arrest. The date was February 22, 1987. He was buried in St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh. According to his will, a foundation was created with his estate for the advancement of the visual arts which was officially founded as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 1987. (Colacello, 273) The Foundation has been encouraging new artists and techniques of art and photography since then. In addition, the Artists Rights Society in the U.S. has been preserving the stills from the major Warhol films which can be viewed by many. Workshops are held regularly in the Andy Warhol Foundation which teaches the techniques of Silkscreen painting and Polaroid Light and Object Photography, the two legacies of Andy Warhol.
References
Colacello, Bob. Holy terror: Andy Warhol close up. Michigan: HarperCollins, 1990.
Harris, John. Enhancing evolution: the ethical case for making better people. NY: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Hughes, Robert. American visions: the epic history of art in America. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Liberatore, Wendy. “Andy Warhol’s photos reflect urge to chronicle every minute of life”. Daily Gazette. Sunday, 2008. Daily Gazette. Web.
Warhol, Andy, Michelson, Annette and B. H. D. Buchloh. Andy Warhol: Volume 2. LA: MIT Press, 2001.
Williams, Robert. Art theory: an historical introduction. LA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.