Andy Warhol ©John Therry Catholic High School 2010 Demetrius Road, Rosemeadow.

Andy

Warhol©John Therry Catholic High

School 2010 Demetrius Road, Rosemeadow

Features of Pop Art

•Was grounded in Dada, elements of collage and assemblage

•Saw acrylic paints from the 1950s used to express the excitement and spontaneity of the new age

•Saw techniques previously used in commercial advertising, such as billboard murals and commercial silk screens, become legitimate methods of art production

•Addressed the contemporary age and drew its imagery from items of local popular culture

©John Therry Catholic High School 2010 Demetrius Road,

Rosemeadow

Pop art offered its audience something tangible to understand. It addressed itself, like advertising, to a mass audience, and was a real expression of its time. Its artists borrowed from commercial advertising sources such as magazine illustrations, comics and billboard advertisements. Many Pop artists were in fact advertising illustrators early in their careers. Audiences had often struggled to understand Abstract Expressionism. Now they were confronted with images of movie stars, soft drinks and other supermarket items presented as art. Such art was readily recognised, accessible to all and not just to the art intellectuals Caves to Canvas


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“………The world of Pop is a world of simultaneous fascination and disgust with the visual environment, particularly as manifested in hard-sell advertising, packaging, labels and trademarks…with Andy Warhol it is difficult to tell whether he is repelled by our culture’s commercialisation or whether he wants to merge with it………”

Varieties of Visual Experience Feldman


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Andy Warhol was, in some critics’ eyes, the ultimate post-modern icon; an artist famous

just for being famous


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Brief Biography

•Bachelor of Fine Arts - In New York found design jobs in advertising Specialised in illustrations of shoes

•Began paintings which retained the style of popular advertising, but their motivation was just the opposite The most famous of these works are Campbell’s Soup Cans

•Mirrored society’s obsessions with images of CocaCola bottles, Superman comics and other immediately recognisable popular images

•Where the main concern of advertising was to slip into the unconscious and unrecognisable evoke a feeling of desire, Warhols’ work made the viewer actually stop and look at the images that had become invisible in their familiarity


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The Factory

•Warhol embraced a mode of production similar to that taken on by the industries he was mimicking

•The Factory was not only a production centre for Warhols’ paintings, silk screens and sculptures, but also a central point for the fast-paced life in New York on the 60s.

•He saw fame as the pinnacle of modern consumerism and reveled in it

•His statement that “every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” was an incredible insight into the growing commodification of everyday life


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Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans, which appeared in the early 60s, can now be seen aas the authentic expression of mass, consumerist society. Warhol’s approach to this new democracy, in which you were what you spent, was, as in most things, deeply ambivalent….. The Campbell’s Soup can paintings therefore carried any number of meanings, managing both to celebrate consumerism, purely by the act of putting them on canvas, and gently subvert it. At the core of Warhol’s art, there was nearly always a question mark.

The Chilling Icon of Underground Cool Victor Bockris – reviewed in Birmingham Post 1998


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In August ’62 I started doing silkscreens…I wanted something stronger that gave more of

an assembly line effect. With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll the ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the

glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple – quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it…When Marilyn

Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face – the

first Marilyns.Andy Warhol 1980


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Warhol based many of his Marilyn images on a

publicity still for the 1953 movie “Niagra” He would paint the canvas with a

single colour - turquoise, green, blue, lemon yellow

and then silkscreen Monroe’s face on top,

sometimes alone, sometimes doubled,

sometimes multiples in a grid

MoMA


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In reduplicating the photograph of a heroine

shared by millions, Warhol denied the sense of the

uniqueness of the artist’s personality. He also used a commercial technique, silkscreening – that gives

the picture a crisp, artificial look; even as

Warhol canonises Monroe, he reveals her public image as a carefully structured illusion


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“ If one looks at one of his

portraits, one does not first think of it as a painting, but as a Warhol. He was able to reverse values,

forms, conventions and attitudes in his

art’

Review – About Face Andy Warhol Portraits

Miami Art Museum 2000


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Warhol’s works are collective pictures of our society….. The silk screens of Marilyn Monroe

at the same time promote and

ridicule the myth of the actress who had been made into a

divinity by the mass media


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Warhol’s Marilyn

silkscreens were as ‘…

sentimental as Fords coming

off the assembly line’, each one had ‘…a different

colour but each one was the same as every other’

Victor Bokris 1990


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As a surround for the face, the golden field in Gold Marilyn

Monroe (the only one of Warhol’s Marilyns to use this colour) recalls the religious icons of

Christian Art History – a resonance, however, that the

work suffuses with morbid allure. Redolent of 1950s glamour, the face in Gold Marilyn Monroe is

much like the star herself – high gloss, yet transient; bold, yet vulnerable; compelling, yet

elusive. Surrounded by a void, it is like the fadeout at the end of a

movie

MoMA 2002


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Warhol appropriated a section of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and dealt with it in a variety of

ways

As Warhol had “The Factory” as a studio mass-producing artworks, so the Florentines used the

Bottega or apprenticeship system under the patronage of wealthy nobles such as the Medici

family to speed-up the production of works


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“Venus” has always been the accepted pinnacle of Western Art’s ideal of Beauty. The New York of Warhol’s time craved fame,

youth, beauty and status. It is fitting that this Renaissance Icon of Beauty was commodified by art in the same way as in shampoo advertisements, plastic surgeon’s pamphlets and

beauty salons. ©John Therry Catholic High School 2010 Demetrius Road,

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Elvis and Triple Elvis


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He was one of the most enigmatic figures in American Art. His works

became the definitive expression of a culture obsessed with images….He

single handedly confounded the distinctions between high and low art.

His name was Andy Warhol , and he changed the face of art forever.


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Andy Warhol ©John Therry Catholic High School 2010 Demetrius Road, Rosemeadow.

Documents

demetrius road

rosemeadow pop art

rosemeadow andy warhol

commercial advertising

style of popular advertising

main concern of advertising

fact advertising illustrators

world of pop