Andy Warhol is perhaps the most recognized pop art artist of the 20th century. His popularity quickly led him to become a prominent figure on the world art scene. He was born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
In addition to being an artist, Warhol also devoted himself to film, he is considered an initiator and principal representative of the pop art movement of the 1960s.
His mass-produced works of art emphasized the supposed banality of commercial culture in the United States.
He was a skilled publicist who was able to project an artist’s concept as an impersonal, even empty figure. This artist is, however, a successful celebrity, entrepreneur and social climber.
In this article we will discuss, as far as possible, your figure and the keys to your art.
He was the son of Russian immigrants of what is now eastern Slovakia. Warhol graduated in 1949 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh with a degree in pictorial design.
He then moved to New York, where he worked as a commercial illustrator for about a decade.
Warhol began painting in 1950 and suddenly gained notoriety in 1962. At that time, he displayed paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo’s soap covers.
In 1963, he mass-produced these deliberately worldly images of consumer goods through photographic prints. Soon after, he began printing infinite variations of celebrity portraits in bold colors.
The screen printing technique was ideal for Warhol, as the repeated image was reduced to an insipid and dehumanized cultural icon, an icon that reflected both the supposed emptiness of American material culture and the artist’s non-emotional involvement in the practice of his art.
If we briefly review the main aesthetic theories, we will realize that, for a long time, the idea of art has been associated with beauty, art embellished the world, but was also linked to more or less realistic representations. -known is represented.
Over time these trends have evolved, but there has always been a certain gap between what we consider low culture and high culture. What deserves to be considered art?
Patterns are not static and there is a reassessment granted by the passage of time; for example, the popular has always been marginalized, associated with this low culture. What happens in the 20th century?
Artistic influences come not only from high culture, but also from popular culture and, more particularly, from consumer culture. Television, media, music? All this left a mark on the artists.
Similarly, in a world where everything can be bought, everything can be exchanged and therefore dehumanized. This dehumanized art would revolutionize the world, vindicate popular culture and Western society.
Art no longer needs to respond to the idea of beauty; Art, like society, has evolved. Warhol’s work puts him at the forefront of the emerging pop art movement in the United States. He died on February 22, 1987, in New York City.
Starting in 1974, Andy Warhol filled 610 boxes with his personal belongings, sealed them and shipped them to the warehouse, creating a vast collection of time capsules.
The project is considered a serial work of art. When pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum began carefully exhuming and cataloguing its contents, he discovered that the boxes contained everyday and ephemeral objects.
Warhol’s time capsules contain newspaper articles, e-waste, half-eaten snacks and nail clippings, as well as original project photographs, letters of command, and even some other artwork.
The Andy Warhol Foundation has hired a team of archivers to review everything from taxi receipts to fan mail. Archivers had to meticulously catalog all objects, photograph and investigate foreign items before placing them in a database.
The packaging of objects extracted from the surface of everyday life has become the loom and fabric of this artist’s creative work. Capsules are a joke, a joke about Western culture. A satirical reflection of our own way of life.
Until his death, the artist perpetred what he said in life: “I can simply be an artist without making art: I am art. “In this way, the figure of the artist was raised, creating a certain cult of his person.
The artist is no longer the one who beautifies the world, but the visionary and the eccentric capable of finding beauty or interest in everyday life.
Time capsules are essentially about death. Warhol said, “Everything I do has to do with death. “Marilyn and Elvis’ portraits and time capsules are about death.
The trash can becomes art, everything fits: greeting cards, business cards, an ashtray taken from a trendy restaurant, a photo of Elvis Presley, gift paper and a Christmas ribbon, one?Don’t bother? Beverly Wilshire hotels, etc.
“An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have. “Andy Warhol.
What’s all this? Warhol, ahead of his time in many respects, carefully selected these items and decided to give everyone 15 minutes of glory. It’s hard to think of another artist who could have kept all his garbage and considered it art.
A friend of Francis Bacon’s stored and then stocked up the painter’s objects after his death, however, Bacon is unlikely to consider his former checkpoints to have artistic value.
Warhol thought his waste at the desk was precious, and perhaps if the audience came to see him as such, it would become art. Art is not so much an ideal, a standard, but a point of view, something more complex than Live.
Certainly, the capsules offer a charming view of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.
Warhol is not alone, of course others think capsules have an intrinsic value. An admirer paid the incredible amount of $30,000 to have the honor of opening the last one.
“Human beings are born alone, but everywhere they are chained, daisy chains, interactivity. Social actions are improvised, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange forms. And one way or another, any social action is a negotiation, a compromise between your own desire and the other.
I miss that phrase. I never use it again. My new prayer is “In 15 minutes, everyone will be famous. “
-Andy Warhol about his own work-
Warhol developed a complex artistic personality that played with the artist’s celebrity status and the artist’s notion as an entrepreneur. This model has been replicated by other artists and is a model that many continue to exploit productively.
One way or another, it has become an icon, a symbol of a moment and a revolution. This dehumanized art responds to new needs, new consumption and a new way of life.
In turn, the figure of the artist has ceased to be the craftsman who spends hours in his studio to be a recognizable figure of the general public, an eccentric character with a particular view of the world, becoming art.