Tate Introductions: Warhol E-Book

Stephanie Straine

• Herausgeber: Tate Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Tate Introductions
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 37

Beschreibung

A central figure in pop art, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was one of the most significant and influential artists of the later twentieth century. In the 1960s he began to explore the growing interplay between mass culture and the visual arts, and his constant experimentation with new processes for the dissemination of art played a pivotal role in redefining access to culture and art as we know it today. • At the height of his fame, Warhol claimed he was "abandoning" painting, shifting his practice towards a commitment to the theoretically limitless channels ofpublishing, film, fashion, music, and broadcasting. It was this "transmission" of art and radical ideas that embodied his ethical conviction that "art should be for everyone". • Stephanie Straine is Assistant Curator at Tate Liverpool, and specialises in American art of the 1960s. Her lively yet authoritative text provides the perfect introduction to the life and work of a pioneering artist whose legacy extends into the digital age.

Leseprobe

Andy Warhol

Stephanie Straine

Tate Introductions Tate Publishing

Contents

Title Page‘I can draw anything’: from Pittsburgh to Madison AvenueThe blotted lineLeaving the commercial world behindTurning popPainting and performanceDiscovering the silkscreenAmerica’s traumaAbandoning paintingThe shootingSuccess and shadows: Warhol’s 1970sNotesIndexCopyrightAlso available in this series

Andy Warhol, 1950s. Photograph by Melton-Pippin (with pencil adjustments to face). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Andy Warhol

‘I can draw anything’: from Pittsburgh to Madison Avenue

Andy Warhol worked hard to erase Andrew Warhola. In the iconic images of the pop artist wearing a silver wig and leather jacket at the height of his 1960s fame, the shy, pale boy born in Pittsburgh in 1928 is nowhere to be seen. His early childhood did, however, have a major impact on the artist he was to become, particularly his intensely religious upbringing in the Ruthenian Catholic Church (close to the Russian Orthodox tradition), his bouts of ill health and resulting hypochondria, as well as the working-class poverty his family experienced. His parents Andrej and Julia Warhola were immigrants to the United States from Mikova, a small village now on the Slovakian-Ukraine border, then on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Warhol only learnt English when he entered elementary school; a hybrid dialect of Hungarian and Ukrainian known as ‘Po Nasemu’ was spoken at home. Andrej Warhola became aware of his son’s prodigious artistic talent early on, and started saving money to send him to college. Tragically, he would never see his son’s later success: he died suddenly in 1942, just as Andy was beginning high school.

After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Pictorial Design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Warhol moved to New York in June 1949 with the goal of becoming a commercial artist and illustrator. His first job was to illustrate an article in women’s fashion magazine Glamour, appropriately titled ‘Success Is a Job in New York’. As part of his relentless efforts to seek commissioned work, in a letter to a magazine editor that year he declared: ‘I can draw anything.’1 It was also in 1949 that he officially changed his surname to the Americanised Warhol – a decisive step in his reinvention.

As Warhol himself explained in 1975: ‘I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist … making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’2 This conflation of art and commerce ties together the two halves of his career: his commercially produced drawings of the 1950s, and his later, wildly successful pop artworks. By changing how an artist produces his work, by running his studio as a factory-line production and diversifying those products across a huge range of artistic and pop-cultural means (from film, wallpaper and media installations, to TV commercials, celebrity magazines and portrait commissions), and by dissolving the idea of the artist-as-genius, Warhol radically redefined the parameters of artistic practice in the postwar period.

As a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, Warhol worked primarily on high-fashion advertising jobs, but extended his reach to many other avenues for design. In 1951 he produced a number of drawings that were selected by the major broadcast network CBS for the LP release of their documentary radio series The Nation’s Nightmare. A drawing of a young man injecting drugs into his arm (Tate) was used for the record sleeve’s cover. The hard-hitting social message of the radio programme, linking recreational drug use to the rise in crime across America, is captured by Warhol’s lithe line drawing that emphasises the outstretched arm and clenched fist.

In the summer of 1952, the exhibition preview for Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote was apparently attended by the author himself, something of a triumph for Warhol, who later explained the background to this event: ‘I admire people who do well with words … and I thought Truman Capote filled up space with words so well that when I first got to New York I began writing short fan letters to him and calling him on the phone every day until his mother told me to quit it.’3