Hello, welcome to artistinschool.com com. Today, I'm
going to be telling you 10 interesting facts plus one amazing bonus fact, about the great American
artist Andy Warhol. Warhol was an artist, a director, a film producer and leading light in the visual
art movement known as pop art. He used a variety of media including painting silk-screening and
filmmaking in his work, to explore the link between artistic expression, advertising and the celebrity
culture that flourished in the 1960s. Fact number one, Ondrej Warhola, he would anglicize his name to
Andy Warhol later in life, was born in Pittsburgh, the youngest of three children to immigrant
parents from Czechoslovakia. His mother was devoted to him and used to go door-to-door selling
the flowers she made from tin cans, to supplement the family income. She would also read Andy
stories from comics and reward him with chocolate bars when he finished coloring pages from his
coloring books. When Andy was 24 his mother moved into his apartment and lived with him until 1971,
when he was 43 years old. Fact number two, around the age of nine years old Andy Warhol contracted
Chorea which is a nervous disorder that left him bedridden for a number of months. As a result, his
skin and his hair, lost pigment. The enforced time at home resulted in him using lots of coloring
books, reading Superman comics and idolizing celebrities. Maybe that was the inspiration for
the pop art that was to come later in life. Fact number three, even at a young age Andy Warhol
thought differently for his peers. An incident that happened at high school illustrates this perfectly.
In one of his art lessons his class was asked to prepare an illustrated Willa Cather short story.
Most of his classmates painted pictures of trains bridges and the hero of the story's suicidal leap. Andy
Warhol's response was simply to pour a tin of red paint onto a sheet of paper from a standing
position. It splattered all over the paper. Painting finished. One of his teachers thought his painting
was the most inventive painting he had ever seen. Another teacher thought he was the student least
likely to succeed. Fact number 4. In 1949 Andy moves to New York with artist Philip Pearlstein.
He gets his first job working for a Glamour magazine where he illustrates an article called, 'What
is Success'. He uses a very crude blotted line to create the drawing. A complete contrast
to the sophisticated detailed drawings and illustrations of the time. His drawings were an
instant success and he was soon regarded as the next hot new talent. Fact number 5. In 1960 Andy is
a rich commercial artist and is at the top of his trade, but he desires fame. After all, who has ever
heard of a famous commercial artist? Art provides the answer. So he begins to create hand-painted
pop paintings, based on comic strips, such as Popeye. Around this time he starts to wear outrageous wigs.
They are often ill-fitting and as he once said, 'I am a deeply superficial person. If you wear a wig
everybody notices. Fact number 6. When walking around a supermarket with a friend he came up with
the idea of creating pictures of Campbell's soup cans. He screen printed hundreds of prints featuring
all 32 varieties of the soup. Four out of five of every can of soup sold in America at this time was
produced by Campbell's, so he thought his prints were bound to be popular. He adopted an assembly
line production techniques, to create hundreds of images of soup cans and in 1962 the Ferus Gallery
in Los Angeles, gave Andy a solo exhibition of his soup can paintings. As a joke the gallery next
door put real Campbell soup cans in the window advertising them for 5 for $1. Fact number seven. In
1963 Andy set up a studio in a disused factory, and invited various weird and wonderful individuals
to come work with him. The factory was covered on the inside with silver foil, which created
really interesting effects when he used flash photography. He created a whole series of screen
prints of electric chairs and car crashes, Elvis Presley and the death of President Kennedy. Fame
was increasing and the glitterati were beginning to take notice. Fact number 8. In 1964 Andy
moved out of the painting studio and set up a film studio. It produced a number of very unusual films
including one about the Empire State Building. Simply, a film of the lights on the building going
on and off and lasted for eight hours. And people came to watch it. His film 'Chelsea Girls' created
in 1966 was a double screen movie and was his greatest critical and commercial success. During
1965 after his Flower Exhibition in Paris Andy announced that he was going to retire from
painting. This was a fantastic marketing strategy. Buy your Andy Warhol paintings now, because there's
not going to be any more of them. Fact number 9. On the 3rd of June 1968 Valerie Solanas walked
into Andy's film studio and shot him twice in the stomach. She claimed to represent S.C.U.M., the
Society for Cutting Up Men and blamed Andy for losing her film script, which is why she
shot him. Andy later described the incident saying it seemed unreal, like watching the movie. One in which
the pain was real. Fact number 10. Between 1970 and the 1980s and he was in demand. Stars including
Mick Jagger and Truman Capote flopped to have their portraits produced. Perhaps his most famous
portraits of this period centre around Chairman Mao, the Chinese leader and President Nixon. You may
be aware that in China red is revered and regarded as a lucky colour. Which might explain why Warhol
chose to colour Moa's face blue. And controversially his 1972 presidential poster for Nixon, whose face
he coloured green, contains the interesting slogan, Vote McGovern. Bonus Fact. In 1987, after having a
routine operation for a gallbladder complaint Andy was put into the care of a private nurse.
But she failed to notice that his lips had turned blue. As a result Andy Warhol died of heart failure
aged just 58. The sale of the contents of his house raised 25 million dollars and formed the
basis of the Andy Warhol foundation for the visual arts, which gives grants to organizations and
institutions that support up-and-coming artists. Andy started life in a relatively poor immigrant
family, but through his enormous creative energy, his talent and his sheer ambition, he ended up
becoming a rich and famous celebrity artist. He did indeed live the American dream. Thank you
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