Born in the Pennsylvania town of Forest City in 1928 to Ondrej and Julia Warhola, Andy (Andrew) Warhol was a portraitist, commercial illustrator, painter, author, record producer, and avant-garde maker of films. A major contributor to the pop art movement and coined the term “15 minutes of fame”, this American artist was an icon to whom the tags of both fame and controversy were attached.
Andy studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. His early career involved creating illustrations for several well-known magazines as well as window and advertising displays for retail stores. In the period before the 1960s, he held his first maiden exhibition and began contributing illustrations for books and stories.
Anyone who takes a look at Warhol’s portraits would get an idea of the people with whom he formed close relations and also an insight into who the period’s biggest celebrities and public figures were. On the other end, several of his works were openly gay and therefore rejected. Warhol differed from traditional portraitists in that he depended completely on photography to get an image of the person he wanted to paint. By using techniques of photo-mechanical reproduction, he could increase the size of the image and transfer it on to a canvas. Patches of colour on the surface of the canvases brought the paintings to life.
In the 1960s, Warhol started making paintings of popular American products such as Campbell’s soup cans. His paintings during this period also included portraits on canvas of widely acclaimed celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Troy Donahue.
Despite having announced in 1965 that he was no longer going to paint, six years later Warhol was back focusing more than he had previously done on portraiture. An exhibition held at the ‘Whitney Museum of American Art’ during the period 1979-80 was a showcase of the many portraits Andy had created in the 1970s. In his portrayal of the painter Paul Jenkins, a disjunctive and jarring field is achieved, characterized by no meshing of the acrylic paint and the silk-screened graphic image.
The 1980s were marked by Andy exhibiting his “Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century”, and creating paintings on canvas including ‘Rorschachs’ and ‘The Last Supper.’ Despite being self-conscious about the way he looked, Andy did do portraiture of himself all through his career. These self-portraits always showcased Andy to be the machine-like, remote recorder that he claimed he was. In one that he created in 1986, he silk-screened, off-kilter, four photographic pictures of himself onto a six feet square canvas.
Complications resulting from a surgery performed on his gall bladder resulted in Andy’s untimely death in February 1987.
The author of this article – George Baxter - is an artist who takes great interest in art history. He has written many articles on numerous famous artists. He currently writes articles for http://www.artistsblankcanvas.co.uk who supply high quality stretched canvas to artists in the UK. Many more of his articles can be found at http://www.artistsblankcanvas.co.uk/Art-Articles/index.html
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