Andy Warhol was an American artist and filmmaker who is regarded as an initiator and leading exponent of the ‘Pop Art’ movement. He was a game-changer in the art world, drawing widely from popular culture and everyday subject matter. His work studies the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s.
He had a strikingly prescient view of how the culture of celebrity and image-making would evolve into the 21st-century. His obsession with celebrities, commercial advertising techniques and imagery resulted in era-defining works which remain iconic to this day.
Early Career
After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in pictorial design, Warhol began his career in the late 1940s as a commercial illustrator for fashion magazines and record companies. His breakthrough came in 1962 when he exhibited now-legendary depictions of Campbell’s soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. An exhibition in New York’s Stable Gallery followed shortly thereafter, displaying the first of a series of celebrity portraits including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Sigmund Freud and Elizabeth Taylor. These artworks, which can be understood as a commentary on the banality and ambiguity of American culture, created a stir within the art world and projected both Warhol, and ‘Pop Art’, irrevocably into the spotlight.
Warhol was interested in mortality. He became enamoured with the idea of someone in life using imagery to mask the inevitability of their death, and the endurance of that image beyond their death. He first depicted Elizabeth Taylor in the early 1960s when she was at the height of her career but was also suffering from a serious case of pneumonia, one of many illnesses that plagued her long life. Meanwhile his portrait of Freud is from a series he created in 1980 entitled ‘Ten Portraits of Jews from the Twentieth Century’ in which all the sitters, selected for their impact within their fields, were already dead.
While later in his life he became particularly passionate about the arts of photography and filmmaking, screen printing remained his signature medium. At the time silkscreen was perceived primarily as being a commercial technique, but Warhol harnessed its flat uniformity, as well as the theoretically endless variations it promised of his chosen subject, to produce a series of mass-media images which were repetitive, yet with slight variations.
An Iconic Artist
The value of Andy Warhol’s work has been on a consistent upwards trajectory since his death in 1987. In 2021, Warhol’s work generated in the region of $350 million at auction and those successes appear set to persist with his iconic 40-square-inch screen print ‘Shot Sage Blue Marilyn’ selling for $195 million in May 2022, setting a new record for the most expensive 20th-century artwork ever to sell at auction.
Warhol liked to explore the gaps and overlaps between man and machine, advertising and art. Today these images remain iconic, and evoke a glamour and enigma that continues to enthral us.
Andy Warhol died following surgical complications on 22 February 1987 in New York.