Free Essays on Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is known to many people as the â€Å"Father of Pop Art†. He brought about many examples of the modern art style that is known as â€Å"Pop art†, in various mediums, varying from silkscreen to a cable network. Not only has Warhol greatly contributed to this revolutionary style, but also in many ways, he has created it. Andy Warhol’s style was certainly part of the select first that were even labeled as â€Å"Pop†. The pop art movement began in London during the 1950’s and then quickly spread throughout nearly the entire industrialized world. Although artists did have some overlapping styles, pop art focuses more on the subject and less on style, which was left up to each artist. The main themes that are evident in all pop art revolve around modern social values. The style in which these values were portrayed varied depending on the culture and the artist. Andy Warhol used the media, which captured his eccentricities, to his advantage and that in turn helped in projecting pop art to the public. Warhol’s timing was perfect in introducing pop. He was even separated from other pop artists who were his peers because he was clearly doing different things with his subject matter. Warhol’s continued success made him the most recognizable pop artist. He worked in a period which was referred to as the golden years for art designers and magazine publishers. This period attracted some of the most desirable graphic designers. For many, Warhol was a work of art himself, reflecting back the basic desires of a consumerist American culture. One of his most famous statements was, â€Å"Every person will be world famous for fifteen minutes†. During his life, he graduated from Carnegie Institute of technology in Pittsburg with a fine arts degree. After that he moved to New York City, where he found design jobs in advertising. Before long he had begun specializing in illustrations of shoes. His work appeared in Glamour Magazine and Vogue... Free Essays on Andy Warhol Free Essays on Andy Warhol When considering the life and works of Andy Warhol, one thing is agreed upon: for good or bad, he changed the visual construction of the world we live in. By the time of his death in 1987 he was ranked on the same level with Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock as one of the three most important artists of this century. He was a working man, a social climber, a person who liked to build things, an acquirer of goods, and a known homosexual. These attributes all contributed to the interesting and complicated nature of his art. Andrew Warhola, was born August 6, 1928 in Pittsburg. He was the youngest son of Czechoslovakian immigrants. Andrew was born at the time of the Wall Street Crash (1929) and the Great Depression. Like millions of other families, Andrew’s father could not find work and his early childhood was very difficult and deprived. After several years his family’s financial situation improved and he was older he attend a commercial design course at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology. Although he was very shy and had a strong fear of failure, he did very well there. In 1949, Andrew Warhola moved to New York. After his first commission to illustrate shoes, Andrew noticed that the final ‘a’ of his name was omitted in the credits and since decided to call himself Andy Warhol (a name that he considered youthful). He quickly became a successful and highly paid commercial artist in the 1950’s but desperately wished for fame as a fine artist. He was unsuccessful in his efforts and sold few exhibits. Andrew became depressed and believed that the ‘fine art world’ had rejected his art as old fashioned and irrelevant. Andy needed new ideas to help boost his creativity. He got several ideas from a woman named Muriel Latow; a gallery owner he knew. She advised him to paint what he loved most (like money) or what everybody would recognize (soup cans and coke bottles). Andy expanded on these ideas and his pai... Free Essays on Andy Warhol Andy Warhol Biography 1928-1987 No other artist is as much identified with Pop Art as Andy Warhol is. The media called him the Prince of Pop. Warhol made his way from a Pittsburgh working class family to an American legend. Born in Pittsburgh Andy was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh as the son of Slovak immigrants. His original name was Andrew Warhola. His father was as a construction worker and died in an accident when Andy was 13 years old. Andy showed an early talent in drawing and painting. After high school he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Warhol graduated in 1949 and went to New York where he worked as an illustrator for magazines like Vogue and Harpar's Bazaar and for commercial advertising. He soon became one of New York's most sought of and successful commercial illustrators. The Pop Icon In 1952 Andy Warhol had his first one-man show exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in New York. In 1956 he had an important group exhibition at the renowned Museum of Modern Art. In the sixties Warhol started painting daily objects of mass production like Campbell Soup cans and Coke bottles. Soon he became a famous figure in the New York art scene. From 1962 on he started making silkscreen prints of famous personalities like Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. The spirit of Andy Warhol’s art was to remove the difference between fine arts and the commercial arts used for magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums or advertising campaigns. Warhol once expressed his philosophy in one poignant sentence: "When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums". The Factory The pop artist not only depicted mass products but he also wanted to mass-produce his own works of pop art. Consequently he founded The Factory in 1962. It was an art studio where he employed in a rather chaotic way "art workers" to mass-produce mainly prints and posters but also other items like shoes des... Free Essays on Andy Warhol Pop art is a movement that occurred near the end of the 1950’s. It was a reaction to the seriousness of Abstract Expressionism. Pop art emphasized contemporary social values, the sprawl of urban life, the vulgar, the superficial, and the flashy. Advertising provided a number of starting points for the subjects. A particular favorite advertisement form that Warhol likes to use was product labels. You will see quite a few examples of this in some of his work. (Grolier 1996) Warhol did most of his well-know works in a four year span from 1960 to 1964. He started out by reproducing images such as comic strips on much larger canvases. Some examples of these would be Nancy, Dick Tracy, Superman, and Popeye. He later became much more interested in reproducing labels of products and some people. This became a standard procedure for Warhol during this period. He later began to make movies and photography. (Coplans pg 47-48) At the beginning of his work, he started out with the making comic strip â€Å"reproductions.† They really shouldn’t be considered reproductions because they aren’t always an extremely accurate portrayal of the product. Some of his pieces such as the thirty-two painting collection of Campbell’s Soup Cans, are almost identical to the models he used. While others have a looser quality and are merely starting points on which to begin. (Coplans pg 47) He accomplished the mass amounts of the same subject through many methods. Sometimes he would just paint each of the subjects by hand, one by one. Other times he would use stamp molds and silk-screening. The silk-screening process is very similar to that of an intricate and sophisticated stencil. There is a screen made of fine silk or similar material that is made impermeable to all places except that of the area wanted to be colored. This is done photomechanically, a process that makes photographs into silkscreen. The silk-screening process is fairly simple. You pour ink ... Free Essays on Andy Warhol Andy Warhol is known to many people as the â€Å"Father of Pop Art†. He brought about many examples of the modern art style that is known as â€Å"Pop art†, in various mediums, varying from silkscreen to a cable network. Not only has Warhol greatly contributed to this revolutionary style, but also in many ways, he has created it. Andy Warhol’s style was certainly part of the select first that were even labeled as â€Å"Pop†. The pop art movement began in London during the 1950’s and then quickly spread throughout nearly the entire industrialized world. Although artists did have some overlapping styles, pop art focuses more on the subject and less on style, which was left up to each artist. The main themes that are evident in all pop art revolve around modern social values. The style in which these values were portrayed varied depending on the culture and the artist. Andy Warhol used the media, which captured his eccentricities, to his advantage and that in turn helped in projecting pop art to the public. Warhol’s timing was perfect in introducing pop. He was even separated from other pop artists who were his peers because he was clearly doing different things with his subject matter. Warhol’s continued success made him the most recognizable pop artist. He worked in a period which was referred to as the golden years for art designers and magazine publishers. This period attracted some of the most desirable graphic designers. For many, Warhol was a work of art himself, reflecting back the basic desires of a consumerist American culture. One of his most famous statements was, â€Å"Every person will be world famous for fifteen minutes†. During his life, he graduated from Carnegie Institute of technology in Pittsburg with a fine arts degree. After that he moved to New York City, where he found design jobs in advertising. Before long he had begun specializing in illustrations of shoes. His work appeared in Glamour Magazine and Vogue... Free Essays on Andy Warhol Andy Warhol The title of this exhibit is â€Å"15 Minutes and Counting.† It featured a variety of popular and exciting works of art from artist Andy Warhol. The title of this work could quite possibly have been a play on Warhol’s popularity with the pop art movement. Andy Warhol was considered to be and categorized as a â€Å"pop artist.† This pop art that he was famous for was very loud and untraditional in its composition. Andy explored an easy medium that was accurate when manipulated correctly and produced numerous prints. The medium was sreenprinting. Screen-printing was repetitive and dull so Andy decided to use synthetic polymer paint to spice up the backgrounds and to give each print a different spectrum of color to the uniform prints. One other medium that was skillfully used by Warhol and popular to the public was that of lithography. This was a poster-like look. Herni Toulouse Lautrec first created lithography for artistic purposes. It was originally us ed for advertisement purposes. In 1891, Lautrec did a lithograph entitled â€Å"Moulin Rouge.† This became popular to the people alive in the Art Nouveau period of history. All of Andy’s works lacked depth and shadows making them strictly two-dimensional. He used cultural icons that were popular at the time in order to preserve their limited time of fame. Andy said, â€Å"In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.† I think he meant that everyone shines in one way or another in his or her life, whether it be publically or privately. Another interpretation that I have derived from this is that every cultural icon that is preserved at the time in his artwork will eventually have their fifteen minutes passed up. Upon viewing the exhibit I discovered how hard that it was to find a piece that connected to me through our CULF class considering that I am not familiar with jazz at all. However, I decide upon Andy’s work entitled, â€Å" The Letter to... Free Essays on Andy Warhol The formal education of women artists in the United States has taken quite a long journey. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the workings of a recognized education for these women finally appeared. Two of the most famous and elite schools of art that accepted, and still accept, women pupils are the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (the PAFA). Up until the early nineteenth century, women were mostly taught what is now called a â€Å"fashionable education† (Philadelphia School of Design for Women 5). Their mothers raised them to be proper, young ladies and expert housekeepers in expectation of marriage. If these women were fortunate enough to receive some kind of formalized schooling, they were to study penmanship, limited aspects of their mother language, and very little arithmetic (Philadelphia School of Design for Women 5). Unfortunately, this small degree of education was extremely constrictive to women. I f they never married or were widowed at a young age, they really had no place to go. This form of women’s education created generations of women that were almost entirely dependent on their husbands and male relatives. During the nineteenth century, when the feminist movement was beginning, many schools were established specifically for the education of women, such as the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, and also for the education of both. In the beginning, women’s art schools mostly taught pupils practical applications of art. For example, female art students often studied drawing and lithographing, in hopes that they would be hired by industrial companies as designers. The Philadelphia School of Design for Women was one of the first all women’s art schools to establish this form of education. Founded in 1844 by a woman named Sarah Peter, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women was a school like none that had come before it. Peter was a wealthy woma n o...