Andy Warhol - King of Pop Art

Who was Andy Warhol? He was a commercial illustrator who boldly ventured into the tough, competitive world of pop art and the film industry, making a name for himself and pursuing his goals with one straight mind while the others around him jeered and said he had no substance or depth. He was not afraid of critics; nor was he afraid of failure. He knew what he wanted, and no one could force him to do anything else. And because of his strong will and determination to remain in the art scene, he is today known to the world as the King of Pop Art.

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on the 6th of August 1928 to Andrew (Ondrej)Warhola and Julia Zavacky, both of whom were Rusyns who had emigrated to America from the Carpathian Mountains, which was near the Russia-Poland borders. He was the youngest of the Warhola sons - he had two older brothers named Paul and John - but he was also the one who received the highest education, having studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and graduated as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1949.

On that same year, Andy and a few friends moved to New York where Andy found work as a commercial artist, drawing illustrations for magazines such as Glamour and Vogue. It was also the year that Andy permanently shortened his name from Andrew Warhola to Andy Warhol. His first exhibition in New York opened on the 16th of June 1952, but none of the paintings sold. His 1956 show "Drawings for a Boy Book by Andy Warhol" was a success, and that year he was awarded the 35th Annual Art Directors' Club Award for his Miller shoe advertisement. He received the Art Directors' Club Medal the following year.By that time, Andy was already an accomplished illustrator in the advertising world, but he probably knew that it would never get him anywhere. What he wanted most of all was - attention.

Between 1959 and 1961 Andy Warhol went through what art critic David Bourdon described as a "dramatic, wholly unexpected, and largely inexplicable metamorphosis", evolving from a "stylish illustrator,noted for hiw playful and whimsical drawings to a deadpan painter of comic strips and display ads". At the time, Abstract Expressionism was turning into Pop Art in the hands of painter Robert Rauschenberg who used everyday themes such as Coca Cola bottles in his paintings. Andy, however, took it one step further by turning what once were the settings for his commercial art into the subjects of his serious paintings. Many thought he was making the mistake of his life; many more thought his new style of art was vulgar and distasteful. But as Andy had predicted, his "low culture" paintings gained him a lot of public attention.

And then Andy Warhol started painting Campbell's Soup cans.

Campbell's Soup was a popular product lining the shelves in the typical supermarket then (as it still is now), and it was a food that Andy Warhol had grown up eating. So when Andy presented America with his soup can paintings in 1962, wave upon wave of questions arose. His first soup can paintings were done by hand; later when he discovered the silkscreen technique (one he would adopt to the very end), his soup cans were silkscreened onto the canvas, row piling upon row, all of them mechanical. And people threw up their hands in dismay, wondering just why he chose such commonplace items to be subjects of paintings. No one could tell if he favoured canned soup or if he was just making fun of it; if he was for or against mass production. But perhaps Suzy Stanton's words in her fantasized version of Andy's motives for painting the cans explain it all: "Soup! Who cares about what the soup or the can or Campbells' really means to me? The important thing is what each of you thinks... I've already made my statement - right there!"

More seemingly tasteless paintings came after that: Suicide, Death and Disaster, Electric Chair, all of them paintings depicting death and mortality, which the public were nervous about and avoided. This was followed by his celebrities series of paintings - of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and such. By then Andy had already made a name for himself as a Pop Artist. But that wasn't enough. He wanted to make films too.

His career as a film-maker was launched in 1963 when he did a 6-hour film of a man sleeping, appropriately titled 'Sleep'. Some people thought the movie was beautiful; more thought that it was simply a waste of time and film. There might have been a little bit of Andy's old friend Philip Pearlstein's influence somewhere - once, on the way home from a movie in 1949, Andy had complained that the movie they'd seen was awful, and Philip replied that nothing could be so bad that there was not something interesting in it. In fact, that was just about what Andy would say about his own films later as a film-maker.

There is something else to take note of the year 1963 - that was the year that Andy Warhol's Factory (at 231 East 47th Street) came into existence. It was dubbed the Factory by his friends because of the extensive painting and film-making that took place there. It was decorated silver (aluminium foil and silver paint) by Billy Linich, and almost instantly became the 'in' place for the New York crowd.

In 1965 Andy Warhol publicly announced that he was planning on giving up painting to concentrate on film-making instead (which people probably felt was like going from the pan into the fire then). In that same year, he became the 'manager' of a rock band called the Velvet Underground, whose leader was the now-famous Lou Reed. The reason? Andy felt that he could link his art with their music. He threw Nico, a German supermodel (who was tone deaf), in with the band, thinking that she would make an attractive vocalist for the Velvet Underground, and presented the group at an annual black-tie banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. The very next day, the Herald Tribune blared the headline 'Psychiatrists flee Warhol'. Critics amusingly compared Nico's unmelodious voice to "an amplified moose" and claimed she sounded like "a Bedouin woman singing a funeral dirge in Arabic while accompanied by an off-key siren". So much for Andy's rock career.

At the end of 1967, Andy's team began looking around for a site for the new Factory. They finally found a vacant floor at the Union Building at 33 Union Street, and decided on a black-and-white 'new' look for the Factory. And then on June 3rd 1968, a crazed woman named Valerie Solanas, who was the sole member in the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM), mowed Andy Warhol down with a .32 automatic pistol. It might have been a very different Pop Art history altogether had Andy remained dead on the surgery table (was was pronounced clinically dead at 4.51 p.m. that day, after all), but he survived despite the fact that a .32 calibre bullet had entered the left side of his torso and ricocheted through his liver, spleen, pancreas, oesophagus, one pulmonary artery and both lungs (comparable to John Kennedy's 'miracle bullet').

For the next few years Andy did relatively little, except in 1969 when he began publication of Interview, a monthly tabloid magazine. It was a collaboration with John Wilcock, with Andy's assistant Gerard Malanga as sub-editor, and today this magazine still exists, with Andy's name still on the head mast.

Andy Warhol's best book was published about 6 years later. It was entitled "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again", and detailed what he thought of art, work, money and fame. In that very same book Andy stated, "Business Art is the step that comes after Art. I started off as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in art is the best kind of business. Making money is art and working is art and business is the best art." A sure sign that money was something he definitely had in mind all along, and a hint that he was not about to stop there.

During the 80's, Andy began work on various video tape productions, and on a private cable TV station called 'Andy Warhol TV' (which eventually failed). He also did his Retrospectiveand Oxidation series, published "POPism:The Warhol 60's", collaborated for a number of paintings with Haitian-Puerte Rican artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and met Pope John Paul II on the 2nd of April 1980 while a number of his movie superstars died or disappeared around him.

In 1986, Andy did the Lenin and Self Portrait series, which were to be his last. For Andy Warhol died on the 22nd of February 1987, following an operation to remove his gallbladder. Some said it was because of neglect. Some said it was meant to be that way, that Andy would've died anyway even with the proper care. Nobody knew for certain. But all that mattered was that the King of Pop Art was dead, and that he left the world with more than half a billion US dollars and more fame than he could have ever imagined when he was just an illustrator, struggling to climb his own ladder of success.

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(Excerpt from an interview with Andy Warhol)

INTERVIEWER: What would you like your famous last words to be?
WARHOL: Goodbye.