By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2020
What this article is about
This article is about the American pop artist Andy Warhol (1928–87). He was an artist, writer, director and producer whose work spans many media. He is rightly famous for some of his creations, for fostering a Bohemian lifestyle in New York, and for declaring that everybody will ultimately enjoy 15 minutes of fame. In 2009 'The Economist' described his work as 'the bellwether of the art market', meaning that the prices paid for it show whether art buyers are feeling bullish or bearish.
The Tate is holding an Andy Warhol show from 12th March to 6th September 2020.
Early days, ill health, religion and politics
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928, the third of three sons, in an ethnic enclave of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents were Slovakian immigrants who had arrived earlier that decade. The Great Depression began in 1929, and with a father who was a construction worker when little was being built, and a mother who was an embroiderer, life was tough.
It became tougher when Warhol developed chorea, a neurological condition that causes twitching and involuntary spasms, difficulty gripping, and problems with speaking and swallowing. It left him bed-bound for some time as a child, though he recovered, which suggests it was Sydenham's chorea and not the more serious Huntington's.
The family were devout Byzantine Catholics, his mother Julia particularly so. Warhol was openly gay and presided over a Bohemian culture where pretty well anything went, yet he remained deeply religious all his life. He didn't advertise it. But the pastor of his church has told how Warhol visited every day, lit a candle and prayed for a quarter of an hour, and kept an altar, a crucifix and a well-used prayer book by his bed.
He stayed aloof from politics. He once said he felt he should be Republican, since he hated paying taxes, but that “artists just can't be Republican, can they?” Perhaps he felt torn between the Democrats, more likely to sympathise with people from a Slovakian neighbourhood, and the Republicans, who were more likely to buy his art. His most expensive work to date, the 1963 'Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)', fetched US5m.
Health was a recurring problem. Chronic trouble with his gall bladder led to an operation in 1987, followed by complications and a cardiac arrest at just 58. He might easily have died years earlier, when he was shot in the chest. He was missed at once. Thousands of people attended a memorial at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Education
It was Warhol's mother who got him drawing while he was laid up in bed, so the chorea was perhaps a blessing in disguise. When he recovered he just kept going. He attended Schenley High School and, from 1945 to 1949, studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Pictorial Design.
Warhol's contribution to Pop Art
Becoming an illustrator for 'Glamour' magazine thrust Warhol to the forefront of Pop Art. The movement captured the world's attention by experimenting with new media, photography and silk-screen printing, and by using household brands such as Coca-Cola and Campbell's and celebrities including Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse-tung, Elizabeth Taylor and Mick Jagger. Warhol helped the public see 'low art' as 'high art', coupling fine art with materialism and consumerism and implying that it could be cheap and throwaway too.
Pop Art ran from the late 1950s (the phrase was coined in 1958 by the British critic Lawrence Alloway) until the 1970s. Its roots were in Britain. It usually used recognisable flat images of celebrities, comic-book characters and consumer products, often in bright colours, in two dimensions and occasionally three. Warhol also worked in film, so in that sense Pop Art became four-dimensional. (To be pedantic, it had precedents in Gustave Courbet's 'Imagerie d'Épinal' of 1855, Picasso's 'Au Bon Marché' of 1913, and the Dada and Neo-Dada movements.)
Warhol waded in properly in 1961, when he exhibited his work. In 1964 he opened his own studio, 'The Factory', where he worked and rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous. Pop Art stayed influential for another decade before fizzling out in the early 1970s. It was the last gasp of what was later called Modernism, making way for Post-Modernism.
The chameleon who inspired David Bowie
Warhol loved to exude an aura of mystery and reinvent himself. In that he doubtless inspired David Bowie's seemingly endless personas. Bowie apparently met Warhol only once but was a big fan, and both men worked with Lou Reed, the 'Velvet Underground' frontman.
There were other links. Bowie played Warhol in the 1996 film 'Basquiat', directed by Julian Schnabel. And he wrote 'Andy Warhol' for his 1971 album 'Hunky Dory', which he even performed at 'The Factory'. Warhol was apparently offended by the lyric 'Andy Warhol looks a scream', which is interesting given that his elder brother once mistook a photo of Bowie for Andy!
Conclusion
Andy Warhol was a one-off, which is why his work continues to attract attention. Pittsburgh hosts the largest museum in the USA dedicated to a single artist, with over 900 paintings, about 4,000 photographs and almost 80 sculptures.
There's no reason you can't have something more modest in your home or office. Unframed prints of Warhol's work, and prints of his sayings, are widely available for a few pounds at sites such as the Tate's at https://shop.tate.org.uk/andy-warhol-exhibition (expect more during 2020).
You'll want to frame whatever you buy. Any good framers will show you a range of solutions and advise on what suits the work and where it will hang.
EasyFrame is on 01234 856 501 and sales@EasyFrame.co.uk, and they'll always chat even if you don't want to buy!