Looking back on Warhol’s work it is easy to see that he was always much possessed by death; in the early works involving suicides and car crashes, in the later ones with skulls and shadows. His own self-portraits often look like death masks. However, two years before his death, in his book America, he had said, “Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you.” Who would ever have guessed that Andy Warhol could be so easily embarrassed?
Summary
Warhol’s family background was East European Catholic.
He was a successful commercial artist before he was a fine artist.
He was the most famous and I successful of the Pop Artists and played the part to the hilt.
In 1968 he was shot by Valerie Solanas, but survived after being clinically dead for an hour and a half.
His social allegiances gradually changed from New York pop low life to High Bohemia.
He died unexpectedly and comparatively young after an operation to remove his gall bladder.
3 Warhol the Pop Artist
One of the best working definitions of Pop Art I have come across appears at an online source called Biddington’s Pedigree and Provenance (biddingtons.com). It says;
“Pop Art is a 20th century art movement that utilized the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. Pop Art developed in the late 1950s as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and flourished in the sixties and early seventies. Pop Art favored figural imagery and the reproduction of everyday objects, such as Campbell soup cans, comic strips and advertisements. The movement eliminated distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste and between fine art and commercial art techniques.”
This is a perfect description of Andy Warhol’s work.
Lawrence Alloway, an English art critic, appears to have invented the term Pop Art some time in the middle to late 1950s; he himself has said that he doesn’t quite remember when. He originally used it to refer to actual mass-produced products rather than to works of art concerned with these products, but it was a sufficiently useful and appealing label that it soon gained acceptance.
Alloway was connected with the Independent Group, a loose association of artists, architects and writers, based around London’s ICA*.
≡ The Institute of Contemporary Arts, a London gallery that has championed cutting edge, avant-garde art, since the middle of the twentieth century.
Rejecting the idea of a British aesthetic, they embraced American popular culture, technology, Hollywood movies and science fiction imagery.
The artists involved included Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, the latter being responsible for a 1956 collage called Just What Is It that Makes Today’s homes so Different, so Appealing which is usually regarded as the first work of Pop Art. It features a body builder, a stripper with a lampshade on her head, the cover of Young Romance magazine, a television, a tape recorder and a can of processed ham. Most of the elements of Pop Art and pop imagery were thus represented.
However, despite these English origins, Pop Art feels like an essentially American rather than English form. American Pop Artists were mostly unaware of their British counterparts. In fact, individual artists in America seem to have had little contact with each other until after their first major exhibitions. But something was obviously in the air on both sides of the Atlantic.
It had much to do with World War II. For the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, America had looked to Europe for its art. Europe was supposedly the upholder of tradition, culture and civilization, as well as the breeding ground for new forms of art. Impressionism¹, Cubism², Surrealism³, and a host of other movements had all emerged from Europe.
1: The late nineteenth-century movement that marks the beginning of modern art, employing exuberant colour and vigorous brush strokes, often giving a sketchy ‘unfinished’ appearance. Generally concentrated on contemporary and vernacular subject matter. Artists include Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Degas.
2: A short-lived artistic movement that reduced physical forms to cubes, spheres and cylinders. It also contended that objects were best depicted by simultaneously showing them from multiple viewpoints. Artists include Picasso and Braque.
3: A post-Freudian artistic and literary movement involving the unrestrained exploration and expression of the unconscious and subconscious mind. Artists include Dali, Ernst, Magritte.
America was supposed to be the uncouth philistine cousin. By 1945 Europe had torn itself apart in two world wars, many of its major cities were in ruins, and the Allies had been victorious only after the intervention of the United States. Observers in both Europe and America saw that America might not be quite so uncouth and uncultured after all.
Abstract Expressionism was the first great post-war artistic movement. The name says it all. Based in and around New York, artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning created vast non-figurative canvases that used gestural painting to convey broad, passionate, if unspecified, feelings. It was possible to see this as an expression of post-war angst, although Pollock’s angst seems to have been inspired by his personal demons rather than by external events, and one might well have said that the artists still living in Europe had rather more to be angst-ridden about than did those in America.
Abstract Expressionism was lofty, serious, existential. It was spiritual but in a highly intellectual way. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t meant to be. It certainly had nothing much to do with American life as most people lived it. It is very easy to see Pop Art as a reaction against this rather grim high seriousness.
Giant, inchoate works by Rothko or Pollock may have caused a certain public outrage for being ‘the kind of thing a child could do’, but they were entirely defensible intellectually. But what intellectual argument might be brought to defend works of art that were so fiercely unintellectual as those of Pop? Could you defend a painting like Roy Lichtenstein’s Sponge (1962), which was merely a reworking of a cartoon panel showing a hand holding a sponge? Or a Claes Oldbenberg sculpture like Soft Typewriter (1963), a typewriter big enough for a giant to use, made from vinyl and kapok? Or how about Tom Wesselman’s Landscape № 5 (1964), which featured an almost life-size Volkswagen Beetle made of out of billboard materials?
The answer was that you could defend these works intellectually as comments on the environment or some such, but you really didn’t need to. Pop Art, like pop music, was a thing you either ‘got’ or you didn’t. If you had to have it explained, you would never truly understand it.
You can certainly make the argument that Pop Art is profoundly democratic. It takes ordinary, everyday life as its inspiration. It celebrates consumerism and the mass media. It deals with many of the things that high art had previously ignored, had indeed been opposed to, things like advertising, cars, aeroplanes, junk food, shiny surfaces, movie stars. It had glamour, colour and a sense of humour.
Again, as with pop music, its playfulness was part of its appeal. It was obviously in some ways serious and significant, while still being attractive and engaging at a visceral, immediate level. Pop was brash. It was unsubtle. It used the tricks of advertising and commerce. It also appeared, at the time, to be completely disposable, although history has shown that the best of it is surprisingly durable.
There is however, at least, one sense in which Warhol’s work seems not to be quite pure ‘Pop’ at all, and that is in the manner of its detachment. Pop music, especially, is a hot medium. It is born out of passion and demands a passionate response from its audience. Much the same could be said for most popular movies and television. But Warhol’s art is cool and detached. The best popular culture, especially 1960s pop music, is deeply unironic. It says what it means in a way that Warhol never quite does.