PrideFest America 2001 Archives

PrideFest America Archives

Artistic Alternatives:
The Works of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschendberg, and Andy Warhol
March 20 to May 13, 2001

Andy Warhol
by Dr. Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Curator, Philadelphia Art Alliance

The Kiss
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No artist is more identified with Pop Art than Andy Warhol. Critic Arthur Danto once called him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced." Warhol is best known for his use of visual images from comic books, newspapers, film stills, publicity photos, and advertisements. His use of the stencil silkscreen technique allowed him to appropriate images directly from their source, making minimal alterations during the process. The stencil (and later the photo) silkscreen process of producing nearly-identical multiples allowed Warhol to remove any trace of the artist's "hand" in the creative process and hence to question the authenticity and originality of a work of art.

Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg started employing silkscreening techniques independently in 1962. Lawrence Alloway (the critic who coined the term Pop Art) noted that: "the subject matter of Warhol's paintings is taken from the public realm, and clearly so. This is unlike Rauschenberg's use . . . which tend[s] to a porous interpretation . . . [Warhol's technique] is a brilliant fusion of the readymade with the flatness of painting."

Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA. He studied art at Carnegie Institute of Technology and immediately moved to New York City after graduation in 1949. Warhol began his career as a commercial artist whose clients included Glamour, Vogue, Seventeen, Harper's Bazaar, and Bergdorf Goodman. In 1956 Warhol started making paintings that selectively copied advertisements, newspaper headlines, and comics by hand. In 1962 Warhol discovered that the photo-silkscreen technique allowed him to transfer appropriated images directly to the surface rather than copying them by hand. In that same year he had several breakthrough solo exhibitions at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Stable Gallery in New York. In 1963 he moved his studio to a loft building on the Upper East Side, which later became known as The Factory.

Mao
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During his years at The Factory, an entourage of artists, poets, and actors in his paintings, prints, and films assisted Warhol. (His films served as raw material for his relatively few sculptures. For instance, several frames from his film Kiss were silkscreened on to Plexiglas, as in Small Kiss [1966]). In the 1970s Warhol extended the scope of his artistic activity to book collaborations, graphic design (a special issue of the avant-garde publication Aspen Magazine from 1966 was designed by Warhol and is on view in the next gallery), and producing the magazine Interview (a sample with Liza Minelli on the cover).

During the 1970s, Warhol endorsed a range of companies (airlines and news magazines, for example) while continuing to make films as well as commissioned portraits of celebrities, aristocracy, and leaders. The silkscreen "portraits" of Chinese political leader Mao on view here were not commissioned but made from a leaflet on Mao's teachings circulating in the U.S. among Leftist and anti-war groups. During the late 1970s and 1980s Warhol was the subject of countless survey and retrospective exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

Andy Warhol died in February 1987 following gall-bladder surgery in New York City.

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