Biography

Contributions

Paintings

When he decided to pursue a career as an artist, Warhol already had established a reputation as a commercial illustrator
mostly doing illustrations of shoes. In school he had created
paintings, but his work afterward had mainly consisted of "blotted ink"
illustrations for warehouses and magazines. He felt he was not being
taken seriously as an illustrator and wanted to become a true artist.

When he started painting, he wanted to find a niche for himself. At that time Pop Art--as it was later to be called--already was an experimental form used by artists as an alternative to abstract expressionism. Warhol turned to this new style where popular subjects could be part of the artist's vocabulary. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with added paint drips.
He added these drips to give his paintings a seriousness by emulating
the style of the abstract expressionists that were en vogue at the
time. He wanted to be taken seriously or to sell his paintings, which
may have had the same meaning to Warhol.

To him, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons already were being used by the artist Roy Lichtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns,
and so on; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends
suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. In his
signature way of taking things literally, for his first major exhibition he painted his famous cans of Campbell's Soup, which he had for lunch most of his life. Warhol loved money, so he later painted money. He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well.

From these beginnings he developed his later style and subjects.
Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to
do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating
the hand-made from the artistic process. Warhol employed silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. In other words, Warhol went from being a painter to being a designer
of paintings. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had
several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, in different
versions and variations following his directions.

As time went on, Warhol's work became more conceptual and more reflective of art itself. His series of do-it-yourself paintings and Rorschach blots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (literally, wallpaper with a cow motif)
and his oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that
show oxidated urine stains) are also noteworthy in this context.
Equally noteworthy is the way these works -- and their means of production -- mirrored the mores and atmosphere at Andy's New York "Factory." Biographer Bob Colacello provides some fascinating details on Andy's "piss paintings":

"Victor... was Andy's ghost pisser on the Oxidations. He would come
to the Factory to urinate on canvases that had already been primed with
copper-based paint by Andy or Ronnie Cutrone, who was a second ghost
pisser, much appreciated by Andy, who said that the vitamin B that
Ronnie took made a prettier color when the acid in the urine turned the
copper green… Did Andy ever use his own urine? My diary shows that when
he first began the series, in December 1977, he did… and there were
many others: boys who'd come to lunch and drink too much wine, and find
it funny or even flattering to be asked to help Andy 'paint.' Andy
always had a little extra bounce in his walk as he led them to his
studio..." ("Holy Terror - Andy Warhol Close Up," New York,
Harper/Collins, 1990, p. 343).

It has been suggested that Warhol would just take images of things
that were hip in his time and cover them in "Warhol gravy", but for
Warhol there always was a personal relation between him and his
subjects. For instance the Campbell's Soup did not only function as an
illustration of commercial industry and advertisement, it was an intrinsic
part of Warhol's life and memories. As a child his mother had given him
this soup when he was sick, and Warhol loved it very much as a
grown-up. For him (and for many other Americans) the soup represented a
feeling of being "home."

Another criterion that was important in the way Warhol chose his subjects was they had to represent a more philosophical notion and have a metaphorical
quality. When Warhol painted money, he painted it because he wanted to
own it - canvases filled with money. Partly his work was meant to
provide him with this money (and success, fame and maybe even love). At
the same time, these paintings spoke of art as a commercial commodity:
the paintings of dollar bills represented monetary value as well as
investments. In this way, instead of merely depicting dollar bills, the
paintings touched on notions like artistic value or as a comment on art
practice.

Similarly, when Warhol painted photographs of disasters in bright
colors ("Red Car Crash", "Purple Jumping Man", "Orange Disaster") they
pointed at the horror of the event in the picture and its media
value but also at the way in which such images are trivialized by the
media. By turning these "random" clippings into paintings, Warhol
transformed them into monuments for personal tragedies. As such, they
represent a personal experience as well as a social comment and an
illustration of a time when the media grew in pertinence and relevance.

Films

Warhol worked across a wide range of mediums - painting,
photography, drawing, and sculpture. He was also a highly prolific
filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than sixty films. One of
his most famous films, Sleep (1963), shows a man (John Giorno, with whom Warhol had a relationship) sleeping for eight hours. The 35-minute film Blow Job (1963) is one continuous shot of the face of Tom Baker, receiving fellatio from Willard Maas. Another, Empire (1964), consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. Warhol's 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film Camp.

His most popular and critically successful film was Chelsea Girls
(1966). The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two
16-mm films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories
being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be
raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for
the other. Then it would be the other film's turn to bask in the glory
of sound. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal
silk-screen works of the early 1960s. The influence of the film's
split-screen, multi-narrative style could be felt in such modern work
as Mike Figgis' Timecode and, however indirectly, the early seasons of 24 (TV series).

Other important films include My Hustler (1965) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), a raunchy pseudo-western. Blue Movie, a film in which Warhol superstar Viva
makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the
film's playing-time, was Warhol's last film as director. The film was
at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter.
For many years Viva refused to allow it to be screened. It was publicly
screened in New York in 2005 for the first time in over thirty years.

After his June 3, 1968 shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat. All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein,
were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had
attempted. These latter "Warhol" films, all of which frankly were made
to make money, starred Joe Dallesandro, who was more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.

In order to facilitate the success of these Warhol-branded,
Morrissey-directed movies in the marketplace, all of Warhol's earlier
avant-garde films were removed from distribution and exhibition by 1972.

Another film, Bad, made significant impact as a "Warhol" film yet was directed by Jed Johnson. Bad starred the infamous Carroll Baker and a young Perry King.

The first volume of a catalogue raisoné for the Factory film archive is to be published in the spring of 2006.

Filmography

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• Blow Job (1963)


• Eat (1963)


• Haircut (1963)


• Kiss (1963)


• Naomi's Birthday Party (1963)


• Sleep (1963)


• 13 Most Beautiful Women (1964)


• Batman Dracula (1964)


• Clockwork (1964)


• Couch (1964)


• Drunk (1964)


• Empire (1964)


• The End of Dawn (1964)


• Lips (1964)


• Mario Banana I (1964)


• Mario Banana II (1964)


• Messy Lives (1964)


• Naomi and Rufus Kiss (1964)


• Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of (1964)


• The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964)


• Beauty #2 (1965)


• Bitch (1965)


• Camp (1965)


• Harlot (1965)


• Horse (1965)


• Kitchen (1965)


• The Life of Juanita Castro (1965)


• My Hustler (1965)


• Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)


• Restaurant (1965)


• Space (1965)

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• Taylor Mead's Ass (1965)


• Vinyl (1965)


• Screen Test (1965)


• Screen Test #2 (1965)


• Ari and Mario (1966)


• Hedy (1966)


• Kiss the Boot (1966)


• Milk (1966)


• Salvador Dalí (1966)


• Shower (1966)


• Sunset (1966)


• Superboy (1966)


• The Closet (1966)


• Chelsea Girls (1966)


• The Beard (1966)


• More Milk, Yvette (1966)


• Outer and Inner Space (1966)


• The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966)


• The Andy Warhol Story (1967)


• Tiger Morse (1967)


• **** (1967)


• The Imitation of Christ (1967)


• The Nude Restaurant (1967)


• Bike Boy (1967)


• I, a Man (1967)


• San Diego Surf (1968)


• The Loves of Ondine (1968)


• Blue Movie (1969)


• Lonesome Cowboys (1969)


• L'Amour (1972)

Warhol adopted the band the Velvet Underground as one of his projects in the 1960s, "producing" their first album The Velvet Underground and Nico as well as providing the album art. After the band became successful Warhol and band leader Lou Reed started to disagree more and more about the direction the band should take, and the contact between them faded.

In 1990 Reed recorded the album Songs for Drella (one of Warhol's nicknames was Drella, a combination of Dracula and Cinderella) with fellow Velvet Underground alumnus John Cale. On Drella, Reed apologizes and comes to terms with his part in their conflict.

Warhol was also friendly with many musicians, including Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and he appeared as a bartender in The Cars' music video for their single "Hello Again," and Curiosity Killed The Cat's
video for their "Misfit" single (both videos, and others, were produced
by Warhol's video production company). He had a crush on Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes, with whom he met fairly often.

Actor and journalist Sam Slovick is mentioned in the Andy Warhol Diaries.

Books and Print

Warhol "wrote" several books.

• A, a novel (1968, ISBN 0-8021-3553-6)
  is a literal transcription - containing spelling errors and
  phonetically written background noise and mumbling - of audio
  recordings of Ondine and several of Andy Warhol's friends hanging out at the Factory, talking, going out.


• The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; from A to B and back again (1975, ISBN 0-15-671720-4) - according to Pat Hackett's introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries,
  Pat Hackett did the transcriptions and text for the book based on daily
  phone conversations, sometimes (when Warhol was traveling) using audio
  cassettes that Andy Warhol gave her. Said cassettes contained
  conversations with Brigid Berlin (aka Brigid Polk) and former Interview magazine or Bob Colacello.


• Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980, ISBN 0-15-672960-1), authored by Warhol and Pat Hackett is a retrospective view of the sixties and the role of Pop Art.


• The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989, ISBN 0-446-39138-7,
  ed by Pat Hackett) is an ed diary that was dictated by Warhol
  to Hackett in daily phone conversations. Warhol started keeping a diary
  to keep track of his expenses after being audited, although it soon
  evolved to include his personal and cultural observations.

Warhol created the fashion magazine Interview
that is still published today. The loopy title script on the cover is
thought to be either his own handwriting or that of his mother, Julia
Warhola, who would often do text work for his early commercial pieces.

Achievements

• Drawing:
  Warhol started his career drawing commercial illustrations in
  "blotted-ink" style for warehouses and magazines. Most well known are
  his pictures of shoes. Some of his drawings were published in little booklets,
  like "Yum, Yum, Yum" (about food), "Ho, Ho, Ho" (about Christmas) and
  (of course) "Shoes, Shoes, Shoes." His most artistically acclaimed book
  of drawings is probably "The Gold Book," compiled of sensitive,
  personal drawings of young men. "The Gold Book" is thus dubbed because
  of the leaf-gold that decorates the pages.


• Sculpture: Warhol's most famous sculpture is probably his "Brillo Boxes," silkscreened wooden replicas of Brillo soap boxes. Other famous works include the "Silver Floating Pillows"; gas-filled, silver, pillow-shaped balloons that were floated out of the window during the presentation.


• Audio:
  At one point Warhol carried a portable recorder with him wherever he
  went, taping everything everybody said and did. He referred to this
  device as his "wife." Some of these tapes were the basis for his literary
  work. Another audio-work of Warhol's was his "Invisible Sculpture," a
  presentation in which burglar alarms would go off when entering the
  room. Warhol's cooperation with the musicians of The Velvet Underground
  was driven by an expressed desire to become a music producer.


• Television:
  Andy Warhol dreamed of a television show that he wanted to call "The
  Nothing Special," a special about his favorite subject: Nothing. Later
  in his career he did create two cable television shows, "Andy Warhol's
  TV" in 1982 and "Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes" for MTV in 1986. Besides his own shows he regularly made guest appearances in shows, including a notable appearance on "The Love Boat" wherein a Midwestern wife (Marion Ross) fears Andy Warhol will reveal to her husband (Tom Bosley) her secret past as a Warhol superstar named Marina del Rey.


• Fashion:
  Warhol is quoted for having said: "I'd rather buy a dress and put it up
  on the wall, than put a painting, wouldn't you?" One of his most
  well-known Superstars, Edie Sedgwick, aspired to be a fashion designer, and his good friend Halston
  was a famous one. Warhol's work in fashion includes silkscreened
  dresses, a short sub-career as a catwalk-model and books on fashion as
  well as paintings with fashion (shoes) as a subject.


• Performance Art:
  Warhol and his friends staged happenings; theatrical multimedia
  presentations during parties, containing music, film, slide projections
  and Gerard Malanga in an S&M outfit cracking a whip. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable is the culmination of this area of his work.


• Photography:
  To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by
  his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a
  specific model of Polaroid
  camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This
  photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking
  pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. His late
  oeuvre contains black and white photos sewn together.

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