Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Founder of the pop art movement.
When Warhol was young, he was often sick and forced to stay in bed. To pass the time, he would draw and collect pictures of celebrities. When he was older, he moved to New York City to start a career in advertisement. He was recognized for his creativity and the humour present in his works.
It was in the 60's that he started making his famous artworks such as Soup Cans and the Marylin Munroe series below with a specific silkscreen technique. He created his studio "The Factory" which became more of a party house consistently visited by more and more celebrities. Art was the celebrity. In the Pop Life exhibition shown at the National Art Gallery of Canada (in Ottawa, summer 2010), his guestbook was exhibited as a work of art. It contained the signatures of Mic Jagger, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and many other recognizable names.
This is what created pop art: consumerism, mass-production, and advertising. Warhol showed that even a Coke ad could be art, and placed the high and mighty at the same level as mid-class and even lower-class people. He used Coke to explain what he meant:
"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." (Warhol, Andy (1975). The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.)
Someone tried to kill Warhol just two days before Robert Kennedy himself was assassinated. He almost died from the shot wound but came back twice as strong: his support was the many friends he had made throughout all the parties he hosted. They commissioned expensive portraits from him and helped him back on his feet in no time. The man was a machine, producing thousands of works from Record covers to colorful silkscreens including some very special 'piss paintings'.
ARTWORKS
