🎨 Artistic space #20 - Andy Warhol, pop icon
The artistic, shy and sickly son of a lower-class Pittsburgh immigrant family, Andrew Warhola (1928-1987), known as Andy Warhol, played a crucial role in the birth and development of Pop Art.
Warhol revolutionized contemporary art with a simple jar of Campbell's soup. The Pittsburgh visionary hand painted each of the cans that were destined to become Pop Art icons. His obsession with this everyday object has an explanation. "For 20 years, every day I have eaten the same thing over and over again," said the artist himself.
His career had begun in 1949 when he moved to New York to work as a magazine illustrator and publicist. During the 1950s he gained a reputation for his illustrations for a shoe advertisement.
Warhol also made 32 small canvases with different flavors from the Campbell's cans now on display at the MOMA in New York. He showed these canvases for the first time in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and their rapid revaluation was the great assault on the commercialization of the art world.
But the crucial event for its future artistic projection was the exhibition The American Supermarket, held in 1964, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The exhibition was organized as the typical American small supermarket, although the products exhibited (preserves, meat or posters) were the work of prominent pop artists: Mary Inman, Robert Watts or the controversial Billy Apple. Andy Warhol's contribution was the famous $1,500 can of Campbell's soup. The curious thing is that the can only cost $6. The exhibition was one of the first public events in which the public was confronted with pop art and the question posed by the classical avant-garde about what could be art.
Although Warhol became rich and famous with his paintings, his work encompassed much more. During his most innovative period, from 1963 to 1970, he made good use of the entourage that gathered around him in that environment called Factory, the loft in Manhattan that was his studio attracted by the possibility of appearing in his experimental films.
Warhol's growing fame was supported by his skillful relationship with the media and his role as a guru of modernity. The pop artist acted as a liaison between artists and intellectuals, but also between aristocrats, homosexuals, Hollywood celebrities, models, bohemians and picturesque urban characters.
Compared to the scandalous (and successful) 1960s, the 1970s were calmer years for Warhol, and he spent most of his time hovering around new stars and celebrities to propose a portrait to them. The list included Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Diana Ross, Brigitte Bardot, and Michael Jackson.
In the 1980s, he turned his work around and began to paint details of paintings by Renaissance artists such as Da Vinci, Botticelli, and Uccello.
On February 22, 1987, the Pittsburgh artist died unexpectedly from cardiopulmonary arrest while sleeping while recovering without difficulty from a gall bladder operation at New York Hospital.
He was a controversial character during his lifetime - some critics described his works as pretentious or heavy jokes - and since his death in 1987 he has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, analyses, books, films, and documentaries.
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It's a excellent post I am a fervent fan of Warhol and pop art. I enjoyed reading it a lot. Regards
Thank you so much for your nice comment my friend!
I love Andy Wharl too!
Have a nice day!