Andy Warhol: A Master of the Modern Era. MIKOS ARTS- A Documentary for educational purposes only

this week andy warhol these some of the most famous valuable and controversial works of art ever made for many they epitomize all that they detest about modern art this one is a eurid distorted picture of a film star there are more than 20 versions just one of them sold recently for 28 million dollars and the artist didn't even paint it by himself that artist Andy Warhol is as famous and controversial the images he created all predicted that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes and then spent his life making it come true exploiting the media to transform himself and his eccentric beautiful entourage into celebrities some even say that he heralded the consumer-led celebrity driven world we live in today his influence really does seem to be everywhere from reality TV to Facebook to magazines even to the way that musics performed and his images are incredibly familiar after all Andy Warhol's the man who painted Campbell's tomato soup and also canonized the movie star Marilyn Monroe but just because his work is so widely reproduced and he's so incredibly famous does that mean that he's actually any good I'm gonna try and find the answer my first stop is the o2 arena in London good or best Warhol's art is worth a fortune today this box arrived at the o2 carrying one of his works about to go on show before being auctioned it's a portrait of Michael Jackson made by Warhol in 1984 it bears all the hallmarks of a classic war it's a print with brush strokes of paint layered on top based not on Jackson himself but on a photo of him Warhol simplifies everything detail is replaced by strong garish colors it's almost car to liked and it both reduces Jackson's face to a mask but also fixes it forever in a burst of color the work can still pull in the crowds so what is it about Andy Warhol and his Art that continues to fascinate so many I've come to Pittsburgh in the heart of industrial America Andy Warhol was born here in 1928 in the city certainly proud of its son his work in His image everywhere there's even a bridge that's named after him while I'm visiting Pittsburgh's having a moment of glory hosting the world's leaders for the g20 summit and the spouses of the Presidents and Prime Minister's are being given a tour of the Andy Warhol Museum this is the bus that's going to the Andy Warhol Museum so I better get on it so this is the Andy Warhol bridge and the museum is somewhere just on the other side by the river I think we'll be able to see it in a second the museum's huge seven floors dedicated to Warhol's work here we go this is Gordon Brown's wife just getting out of the car this is the wife of the French president Carla Bruni one of the most stylish women in the world and he would have loved to have made her portrait hi Carla do you like Andy Warhol are you a fan of Andy Warhol what do you like about his art you think the handi would have liked to have made your portrait I don't know because he made one of Jackie Kennedy and now you're one of the most stylish women in the world I don't know but and every time he would shoot or make the portrait of anyone it would just be brilliant thank you so much thank you have a good day that was her I think he would have liked it made her portray I thought she looked berry I feel a bit like Andy a bit intoxicated with the magic of the Stardust that sprinkled over the other side of the barricade today Andy Warhol's associated with glamour celebrity and decadence but his childhood was very different his parents were poor Slovakian immigrants and Andrew wahala grew up in a slum ghetto during the Great Depression of the 30s when Pittsburgh was a dirty industrial steelmaking city this museum recreates life from the tenements where immigrant families like Andy's lived food was often scarce nandi's mum would sometimes make soup out of water and ketchup the tin of Campbell's tomato soup was a real treat Andy later said that his childhood home was the most terrible place he'd ever been when he was 8 he was struck down with a neurological disorder which kept him off school for nearly a year that left him with the poor skin and thin hair that always embarrassed him and a shyness he never overcame he became an anxious social outcast and rarely left the apartment his mother Julie lavished attention on him providing movie magazines colouring in books comics as well as cut out paper dolls and all of them influenced his work in later life it's almost as if the kitchen became his first artist studio with his mum as his assistant she would reward him with a chocolate bar when he finished a good drawing and encouraged him to make collages and Colour in and read to him in her thick Czechoslovakian accent along with his glamorous movie magazines and his only other escape in his drab and dreary life in the tenement was regular visits to church religion played a big part in Andy's life growing up he spent weekends with his mother worshipping at church gazing at the golden screens with her Byzantine icons during those gray Depression years these formed the rich imagery of his childhood it seems to me that Andy's to childhood passions Catholic religion and the movie stars in his magazines later fused together in his art where celebrities became the icons and the objects of worship all the lonely months and II spent in the tournament with his coloring books and his collages paid off he won a place at a local art college in just a week after graduation he escaped from the Pittsburgh ghetto and II moved to New York in 1949 age 21 with only a small suitcase and some samples of his work he dreamt of becoming a famous artist but in the meantime just hoped to make a living as a commercial illustrator he'd arrived in one of the most exciting cities on earth at the threshold of the fabulous 50s the boutiques of Fifth Avenue blazoned a new style and luxury and he was desperate to join this glamorous world it was tantalizingly close but still out of reach with only $200 in his pocket and he arrived here in the Lower East Side and moved into a dingy tenement building that had no hot water and was crawling with cockroaches but he was edging ever closer to his dream the New York he dreamt of was just uptown and soon enough and he made his way to meet the sophisticated art directors of the city's fashion magazines carrying a portfolio of his drawings in a Tassie brown paper bag and his persistence began to pay off when Glamour magazine asked him to illustrate a feature aptly called successes a job in New York they liked his whimsical drawings with their quirky charming figures but further success didn't come immediately for Andy who spent much of his time hanging out in a pretty coffee shop called serendipity I'm just an old-fashioned girl this was a popular haunt of all his favorite movie stars Marilyn Monroe even had her own table here and it's still going recently Madonna threw a birthday party for a daughter ah lovely thank you very much when he was broke and he would knock off drawings like these and swap them for pastries and ice cream serendipity was an oasis Vandy where he could sit and gaze across the tables at Marlena Dietrich and Marilyn and indulge his fantasies of life amongst the stars the owner of the cafe Stephen Bruce was one of the first people to recognize the potential in Andy's drawings hi I'm Stephen Bruce welcome to serendipity well you're the owners yes I am and I see you have a favorite drink which was Andy Warhol's he'd like this one's own frozen hot chocolate and lemon icebox pie is that what it is my god yes Madison Avenue was just a few doors away he was trying to sell all of his artwork to Madison Avenue advertising people yes and he started coming in and having a cappuccino and showing me his rejects he was very sad because if they didn't buy any plague and I said well there's a wonderful shoes here let's frame them so we did we put them on the walls of serendipity when is his first exhibition first exhibition yes have we sold it for $25 we did split he got $12.50 and I got 12,000 back in the 50s when auntie was coming here what was he like in those days he dressed in quiet kind of he was called Raggedy Andy yes he was very preppy he just came from school and he had his own hair then and he had very weak eyes so he had a very dark glasses on and sometimes he would put cardboard punctured with hat pins so he could see out of it so the light would just filter through he was too sensitive to light very sensitive to light maybe that explains why it was wore sunglasses right exactly exactly and I think also that's why he liked you know a wonderful color and his eye for color landed him work with the company supplying leather to designers run by Teddy and Arthur Adelman hi I'm home my goodness must be Teddy hello welcome thank you I'm happy we have a chance to show you our wonderful world of leather they'd use him during the 50s not just as an illustrator but also as a consultant coming up with marketing ideas how easy was he to work with if you said to him here's my idea I need something quickly was he accommodating 100% quick sensational always on the button and on time and no ego amazing no egos know he would come in with this terrible looking portfolios black portfolios long miss and he would open it up and he would have maybe five suggestions usually we loved at least one or two but if we didn't it was no problem you see that's okay that was a big sentence and he would bring it back come back the next day with obviously the perfect answer because he was so smart it was so intelligent he designed everything from a Silver Cloud exhibition stand where he draped the company's leather product over motorbikes to the logo that they still use to this day how would you describe his talent as a commercial artist what was his secret he always had magic and he always had an inner kind of charm it was it was never fake when you looked at it you got like this inside smile which made you feel wonderful and I think that was part of his magic he didn't talk this way but this is the way he drew Andy's quiet demeanor masked an insatiable ambition which along with his talent as a commercial illustrator soon got him noticed his delicate playful drawings had the modern look that Manhattan's art directors wanted and the Commission's soon started rolling in Andy's signature style was the blotted line a technique he developed at college I'm gonna have a go at it myself you can see a beautiful shoe appear in front of your very eyes look at this there's the high heel there is the shoe we'll put a little kind of war hole butterfly on with a few dots and that's all on the shiny paper you know what we cross our fingers make sure the ink is transferred and then this is the big reveal what's not bad I'm not sure what it looks like that could be a Warhol butterfly suppose but I suppose that the key point is that you see here is the blotted line the ink on the shiny paper is transferred to the absorbent paper and you get this very beautiful blurry jagged effect at the line which has a printed feel even though it's something incredibly simple it's funny how popular that retro 50s feel still is today I mean you see it everywhere on cards on wrapping paper or even on kids books like this one which is Madonna's the English roses what's incredible when you flick through and look at these illustrations is how similar they are to Andy's commercial work you see exactly the same sort of uneven broken that handmade quality the lion feels very playful and witty and you've got the same candy floss colors I never really realized the depth at books like these oh to Warhol when he was excelling as a commercial designer back in the 50s well just compared this drawing by Warhol of a cake look how similar they feel with the same colors the same quality to that line which feels very handmade hand printing by the mid 1950s and his career in commercial illustration was really taking off the what he wanted more than ever was to become a famous artist so this is pretty hit this is the historic and bohemian Chelsea Hotel where Warhol set used at Andy's first illustration after leaving Pittsburgh for this article successes of job in New York now seems incredibly apt because within a couple of years he'd become one of the city's hottest commercial artists his work had appeared in Glamour Vogue Harper's Bazaar he did record sleeves and book jackets and dress windows for department stores by the time he was 27 he was already making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year which was big money in the 50s but he's still dreamt of being a real artist the cutting edge artists of the 1950's were people like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock whose abstract paintings mystified the public the famous artists of the time like Jackson Pollock were Butch and intense they express their inner turmoil by flinging paint across huge canvases and brawled over women in taverns in Greenwich Village and he hated them he couldn't have been more different so Andy had to find his own way to break into the fine art establishment for his work to be taken seriously as art rather than just illustrations it had to be about something he had to comment on the world around him and make people look at it differently and the world that and Esau was Boone time America this poor kid had grown up during the Great Depression was obsessed by the 50s consumer revolution the glossy commercials for shiny cars the new supermarkets crammed with undreamed-of varieties of food he loved this mass-produced world of Plenty and with his commercial background and he thought he could create art that reflected it Andy loved coca-cola he once said you know that the president drinks coke you know that Liz Taylor drinks coke and just think you can drink coke too and no amount of money can buy you a better one to him this was such a beautiful quite democratic idea that he thought why shouldn't a bottle of coke be a work of art now this is a reproduction but this is what he created first he's left traces of his own hand you can see all of this loose very drippy very fluid brushstrokes which I guess was Andy's way of saying despite this being a coke bottle this is still a proper painting but it doesn't feel quite right and the next thing he did was so crucial in his development as an artist because he created this and let you can tell it what's that suddenly here's a much stronger bolder style that's all his own it might not seem like much but deciding to depict a commercial object on the canvas and deciding to present it in this very clean and graphic very mechanical mode it was a huge deal in the art world at the time and this turned Andy into the champion of a new movement called pop art artists have always painted things from their everyday lives like a carts buzzers of flowers bowls of fruit what pop art said was that stuff from the commercial world and popular culture could also be art and that's how 32 cans of soup made it onto the walls of America's most important Modern Art Museum and these paintings are among the most famous modern art pictures in the world with these soup cans and he finally managed to break into the fine art world with a landmark solo exhibition in 1962 he started with quite a basic portrait of just tomato soup but that wasn't enough you had old-fashioned tomato rice soup this one I like this is clam chowder Manhattan style which apparently is tomato base rather than a creamy turkey noodle soup if you're alone at Christmas minestrone and when they were first shown most people thought they were a joke but they really mark Andy's coming of age as a pop painter the bright colors the crisp mechanical technique the presentation of a series of nearly identical images they were all things that Andy would play with again and again like coca-cola Campbell's Soup was available to everybody like so much of his later work these paintings are about capitalism they're about the consumer society really they're about us and II had begun a revolution and what could now be classified as ours would never be the same again if we needed any evidence that Andes shaped the modern world then this is it here at Tate Modern you can see some of the biggest names in modern art people like Tracey Emin Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons and all of their work has been shaped really quite a great degree by that of Andy Warhol like it or not with Andy Warhol to thank for today's artists who are obsessed with consumer culture and everyday objects now artists can take anything ordinary Cola cans designer trainers Japanese cartoons stick em in a gallery and declare it art it's still highly controversial so imagine the storm it caused when Andy did it back in the 60s through his art Andy Warhol was exploring the power of branding and marketing he now realized that to achieve his dreams of celebrity he also had to rebrand and market himself after he taken the art world by storm Andy decided that he wanted to become a star on a much bigger stage he used to put on what he called his Andy soon which was an active performing public for the rest of his life stylists brick Smith start understands our clothes can transform a person's public image and she's gonna show me how Andy did it bricks hello I'm Alistair hi how's it going good to meet you now look I really want to find out from you what Andy meant when he talked about his Andy Sue's right Andy Warhol needed to create a persona that people would remember a persona that would help him promote his art and his celebrity had to use himself almost as a work of art and this is how he did it he did it with fashion Andy Warhol was the master of the makeover and there's a few different eras of Andy that I want to show you I've pulled out some photographs right okay right and I want to start with Swan which is the 1950s it's not cool at all no I mean this was the time in the 50s when he was like just just trying so hard to be successful and dragging his art around Madison Avenue and he was kind of like dressed how everybody dressed in those days in fact they used to call him Raggedy Andy because he had the same suit that he were over and over and over again and he had holes in his shoes but anyway so that was him then but almost overnight he totally reinvented himself into this iconic super cool the factory days Andy and heat you know he had loads of different wigs that he customized himself sounds like different wigs for different moods kind of like share what is amazing that he could get away with this because it's so obviously a wig I know but that is what cemented his image into people's mentalities do you know what I mean it's not a brand it was like a brand he created himself as a brand in fact it's been said that Andy Warhol's greatest piece of art is Andy Wolfe when I knew you were coming here I thought it would be a great idea to dress you up like Andy Warhol so I've like pulled a couple different looks from his different eras right are you lucky you don't look that three no I'm he's just talking like so proud yeah this is gonna be the peak of my career I think yeah still don't thank you waiting for all right let's have a look at you I'll Briggs I've only really halfway there oh that's brilliant you looked they think it's put on the wind cool Sandra slow down okay and you would never be seen without without these yeah I think it's great you have to come and have a look come on how do you feel tell me how you I love there I'm not sure that I mean what's quite good about it is it is a bit like a costume isn't it yeah I mean clearly in my case it's a Nandi suit and I suddenly understand that he would kind of put this gear on and it allowed him to play a role right yeah gee bricks golly and you haven't gotta go yes you've got it you so got it the new rebranded Andy Warhol was now ready to face the world and his next artistic venture would bring him all the attention he craved so after suit cans and coke bottles what did I do next to really shake up the art world he put on a show but looked well it looked pretty much like this and he transformed really ritzy upscale New York gallery basically into a supermarket filled it with brillo boxes cartons of apple juice and packets of cornflakes it was about as far from traditional painting on a wall as I could get for the show he printed plywood replicas of the original cardboard boxes some thought it a brilliantly ironic comment on art and modern consumer culture many others thought it was ridiculous and quite possibly a fraud the strange interviews and he gave didn't really clarify the situation yeah Canadian government spokesman said that your art could not be described as original sculpture would you agree with that oh yes why do you agree well because it's not original you have just been copied a common item yes why have you bothered to do that why not create something new huh because it's easier to do it was the start of the Andy persona not just the wig and the glasses but his weird deadpan manner it's a strange way to make yourself famous but it actually works the more mysterious and enigmatic that Andy was the more people were drawn to him so isn't this sort of a joke thing that you're playing on the puppet all right no it gives me something to do Andy's flippant manner and infuriating answers unleashed a storm in the art world and beyond but his supporters believe he was doing something important questioning the need for art to be original arguing that it was the idea behind an artwork that matter not necessarily the skill used make it and his brillo boxes were brash irreverent and mass-produced just like the modern world he saw around him to reinforce his rejection of craft and originality in his art and he started calling his studio that Factory he removed himself almost completely from the hands-on creation his work increasingly using an industrial process he discovered in the early 1960s called silkscreen printing to assist him and he brought in an expert printer gerard malanga I'm gonna meet up with him he brought you on board because you were an expert in silk screening correct yes why was it such a perfect technique for him what well when you look at a silkscreen print whether it's on paper on canvas what you're actually looking at is a painted photograph this was a natural development from the blotted line technique that Andy had used as a commercial artist but silkscreen printing was an industrial process mainly used for creating wallpaper it was perfect for making mass-produced art about a mass-produced world okay that's good Jarrod's gonna show me how to make a silkscreen self-portrait in true Andy style he would say oh that's beautiful is it there by everything we place our blank silkscreen covered in emulsion over the blown-up photograph and expose it to light gas quite heavy and then I have to turn on the vacuum yeah there it transfers the image and reverse onto the screen all right so now we have a stencil which is a negative of the positive acetate yeah I see and then when you put ink through it it you recreate the positive image take the top off the the ink I got to be careful not to spill it everywhere all right just like this yeah that's fine a little bit more yeah okay now get your squeegee sweep it real fast okay the technique allows the artist to build up multiple layers of color transforming the original photograph into something new showing us how the artist sees the subject let's see what I've done Wow Wow look how perfect that is it's not bad the first it said it's too perfect at number two this is so wet so you think Anthony likes that oh yeah he's a call I used to call these a divine accidents and he Yussef went with that idea that it just doesn't matter I look like a pink Mouse with lipstick I'm not sure I like it very much now but there's less pink you see there's more pink in there this is okay I like this much better to this one the silkscreen process became Andy's trademark it allowed him to create some of the most recognizable images in the world Mick Jagger Jackie Onassis his cow wallpaper Chairman Mao and Marilee these are images that are never going to go away in August 1962 movie star Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose and andy immediately decided to make a series of portraits of her he used the exciting new silkscreen technique which he discovered earlier that summer the 24 pictures of Marilyn would combine two of his favorite themes death and celebrity and for me this one simply stunning a first glance Marilyn looks incredibly beautiful even precious like one of the gold-leafed religious icons that Andy saw in church is a boy but something isn't right the silkscreen allowed him to offset the layers of paint so the edges smudge and blur creating an eerie haunting quality the colourful mask covering the colorless photograph echoing Maryland's glittering media created image that hid the profound sadness beneath the colors of the eyelids and lips look like makeup applied by a child Marilyn's face is distorted just as the media distorted her image there's a sadness which chimes with our knowledge of her early death in the maryland's the photograph is always the same but the effect changes from tragic to electrifying from glamour to innocence reflecting the many masks that Marilyn wore to hide the real her as well as celebrity the maryland's are also about death which you can see in this other haunting version it fades from color to black and white almost as if she's washed away it's like the transition of Marilyn Monroe from this life to the next death and celebrity are still constantly explored in modern art Marc Quinn is one of Britain's most successful artists and like many others he's inspired by Warhol oh and this is one of your statues of Kate Moss that's right yeah now this isn't the one that you made actually from God no this is bronze all of your series about Kate Moss you must have been thinking about Warhol's maryland's when you were making them absolutely where's the kind of female divinity at the moment and it shocked me that perhaps in the sixties it was Warhol for water it was Marilyn and now it was Kate and is this the same thing that Warhol was driving out with those Marilyn's I mean what I love about that image is that it crystallizes these twin obsessions of Warhol celebrity on the one hand and death on the other and it just seems that those are two very very meaty weighty quite resonant themes which are still very attractive to artists working today I agree celebrity and death are both two sides of the same coin in a way because celebrity is about immortality it's about aspiring to perfection getting to a Mount Olympus a better place that we're only populated by stars which is like now like OK Magazine you know but it's a kind of parody is a parody of these classic and classical obsessions that are part of the human psyche but it's not just artists who still feed off walk today he's a multi-million pound business as fashion brands ranging from Versace to Pepe jeans endlessly recycled his imagery Andy once said that department stores were the new museum he realized that shopping would obsess the coming generation and he wanted to be right at the heart of his glossy new era today nearly 50 years after his glory days as a pop artist his work has moved out of the gallery and into our everyday lives it's so strong so reproducible that it appears everywhere with Andy Warhol hi art became a brand his art about modern consumer culture had become part of it but can in vogue fashion label Warhol and his brand can still stamp cool on to anything even this pool in a boutique hotel and the cover of Madonna's 2009 greatest hits album celebration but what is it about Andy's images that makes them so popular today I've come to ad agency mccann-erickson to ask Farris Jakub what I really want to know is why am i wearing a t-shirt printed with Andy Warhol's face nearly fifty years after he's making this kind of imagery he was brilliant at branding he was very consciously using some of the sort of tricks and strategies of advertising but it feels like he was much more intuitive about it it was much more natural thing I think he was really ahead of his time and looking at how you know Enda see we replicating your own image changes how people see you and stuff and Facebook is an obvious example so the idea of personal branding kind of used to make me feel a bit nauseous because it's like it seems very artificial but now everybody is putting pictures themselves online and expressing themselves on Twitter and Facebook and lots of different platforms and so inevitably whether or not you think you're creating a brand you are creating a brand but now I mean people take Warhol's image in vain all the time actually within the max installed applications there's a way to walleyes yourself right again what does it involve I'll grab a picture of you and I will show you so I will take a picture well I'll look so we can just we can we can create a Warhol image right now okay you're anything it okay right go so I did add a little them do to it an Andy finger great I've seen lots of these on Facebook it's almost become more popular than putting up your own images as if it gives you instant credibility and cool it's appropriating call from Andy people first started trying to appropriate Andy's cool in the 1960s then a growing celebrity hungry entourage began hanging out at his silver foil covered studio the factory this was more than just a place where Andy made art it became the high temple of New York's wild underground scene outside was still a world of men in suits ladies and pretty dresses cocktail parties and polite restraint while at the factory the swing sixties were being created freaks hung out with Hollywood stars like Jane Fonda in an outrageous drug fueled gender-bending circus and Andy Warhol would watch today some survivors from the silver factory years like Gerard malanga still get together Billy name is another veteran from those drug-crazed days who famously locked himself in a storeroom for a year later on I get an impression at the factory that it wasn't always a happy place that sometimes it was quite days they were drama they weren't on but there's no different from in your own family you know and if but if it was like a family what role do you think Andy play because it strikes was not very much like a day well it was more like a family and a TV show so everyone was a character so Andy would have been the wizard the magician the magnetic center camera luring rolling the Deanery in the summer of 1963 and he bought his first handheld movie camera and started shooting films and not long afterwards he made his first screen tests three-minute film portraits of factory regulars and beautiful and famous visitors people like Dennis Hopper Bob Dylan Salvador Dali everyone who was anyone in the early 60s in New York the only thing that Andy would tell them was to stare directly at the camera whatever else they did was up to them the screen tests were like moving portraits using film to make art was another important leap that Andy made a further break from traditional art now Susan's car say cheese can we do a cheese moving all you have to do say cheese cheese alright now the next button and excrements could be achievable here wall holes filming the writer and activist Susan Sontag Billy name remembers exactly how Andy would stage is screen tests well if you want a real Andy Warhol screen test there's a specific set up this feels like an interrogation where it's it's sort of like Andy Warhol SNN yeah right it's a bit sadistic or in let's take a look at that lady Oh see that it's kind of bright well it's only gonna be work how many minutes is the format three minutes the Eliquis three minutes feels like hours sitting with that black eye boring into you you feel incredibly self-conscious and exposed it's like a condensed version of Big Brother the unwavering penetrating gaze of the camera stripping off the mask to reveal the real person underneath the first voyeuristic reality TV I'd like to know why so many people chose to put themselves through this for Andy so I'm on my way to meet the interior designer Nikki Haslam is a celebrity in his own right and he knew Andy back in the 60s and often visited the silver factory and I'm hoping he's going to be able to paint a picture of what the scene at the time was well Nikki I like I haven't get any of it how are you I'm very much Gavin coming with you this place looks ridiculously lavish and grand god yes would have been a good place worth to Jane and II when he was in LA I bet he would have loved this so you went along to the famous factory so what yes I did I went to the first all the factory quite often what was he like in those days he had it he did have that sort of aura that conferred a kind of genuine happiness on to that made you feel famous for 15 minutes how good sir glamorous was that being some touched by the God of Fame I just do you have to do anything do you think he was a real voyeur I'm sure he was the void and everyone ever resents the word if he was kind like about outside himself looking in and he didn't necessarily want to be the center of things he wants to watch and see I see other people's reactions and how are the other people lived their life he was under shockable and he was shocked yeah he hit but he loved being shocked that's the point as well as the screen tests he started making other films about the most boring aspects of human life like people sleeping but your first major picture was called sleep and I'd lose eight hours straight filming of a man asleep here was George or no Peter sort of a telephone poet New York now why did you why did you decide to just shoot somebody sleeping for eight hours why he just said that he sleep so soundly and you've just put he falls asleep and he left his door open in New York which is so strange he's just left us front door open you could just walk right in maybe you think it's a bit crass but when I sort of think of people watching 24 hour coverage of the Big Brother house and seeing people asleep I sort of think that wouldn't be there if it wasn't for Andy Warhol making sleep in the early 60s but it's probably true to say there is a very very strong link and and his sort of genius or so making the barn owl and the trivial interesting or the films that he made they've become kind of the footprint of reality TV in a sense was that his gift he could draw out the superstar on all of us yes I think that you've put your finger on I think he thought everybody had had a point on everywhere her super somewhere and everybody was as a superstar quality that he could mine and make interesting so Andy Warhol realized that with enough exposure anybody could be a celebrity before anyone else and he saw what was coming a new global phenomenon of celebrity like it had never been before he coined the term superstar and these prophecy was that there'd be a new kind of person instinctively realized that anyone who could find a way to get in front of a camera would automatically become a celebrity he looked into the future so lonely Paris Hilton but Jade Goody and Susan Boyle I like the boy looking hated at times now she's a middle-aged volunteer church worker from Blackburn in Scotland and II discovered that he could manufacture celebrity and his experiments in film proved that he no longer had to restrict himself to paintings in 1965 and Eid announced that he's going to leave painting behind him altogether and concentrate on a whole raft of different projects and in the same year he began to manage Lou Reed and John Cale's band The Velvet Underground and this is the classic banana record sleeve that he designed for their album The Velvet Underground Nico which is released in 1967 as producer for The Velvet Underground and he said he wanted to create the biggest discotheque in the world combining music film and performance the band played with his movies projected onto walls and his beautiful entourage dancing encouraging them to let go and experiment with their sound Warhol created a blueprint for a new style of multimedia music performance up to now most bands had looked a bit like this but The Velvet Underground inspired musicians like David Bowie to really let loose with wild and outlandish performances now he paid tribute in his song Andy Warhol some people claimed that the Velvet Underground we're almost as influential as the Beatles and of course it wasn't just Bowie he was inspired by them and he was obsessed with Warhol you could say that the whole punk rock movement that emerged in the 70s owed a massive debt to Warhol's factory scene as well Andy had come a long way from Pittsburgh he'd realized his dreams and become an American icon in his own right but he was about to learn for himself the price of celebrity June 1968 a mentally unstable young feminist called Valerie Solanas who'd actually appeared in one of Andy's films and was the founder and sole member of scum or the Society for cutting up men arrived at the factory with two guns hidden in a brown paper bag she shot Andy almost killing him as he later said he was just in the wrong place at the right time it's ironic but throughout his career and he'd been fascinated by violent death he'd even created an entire series exploring the subject known as the death and disaster paintings this one from 1963 is one of the best of the lot it shows a gruesome tabloid photograph of a car crash repeated 14 times the first thing that hits you is its unflinching in-your-face power the repeated images have this jittery quality like film rushing through a camera it gives a sense of speed of action unfolding sense of time look closely you can see a corpse slumped in the passenger seat it's horrible and completely at odds with the jaunty orange background so was Andy being heartless I don't think so just honest I think he's trying to tell us something fundamental about our times the power of this painting is in the repetition Andy wanted to imitate what he saw happening in newspapers and on television that unending flow of news reports covering all sorts of catastrophes not just car crashes but plane disasters suicide and he was completely mesmerized by the footage showing President Kennedy at the moment of his death which was repeatedly played on national television and he was right to be nearly 40 years on think of the footage of the planes going into the Twin Towers it was replayed on television screens again and again and again as always Andy refused to talk about the meaning behind these works he just say oh they're about nothing leaving it to art critics like me to argue that the car crashes and electric chairs a serious comment on our time actually I think the death and disaster paintings are his best work and they've become incredibly valuable in 2007 Warhol's green car crash sold for 72 million dollars Alton money have always gone hand in hand but Andy's behavior in later life made some question whether for him it was just about the money and his own personal disaster shooting of 68 has an incredibly profound effect on him afterwards he was completely transformed as an artist he smartened up his entourage and became brazenly interested in making as much money as he possibly could he even said 1975 that good business is the best art the next 20 years everything became business and he became a professional party goer the shameless stalwart of the celebrity circuit he had a TV chat show and joined a model agency became Court painter to the rich and famous and appeared in everything from Japanese TV commercials to pop videos and he even launched a celebrity magazine called interview it's still going strong today it was the precursor to celeb gossip mags like Hello heat and okay Paul this makes many wonder whether Warhol's art was ever a comment on celebrity and consumer culture or just a part of it the others like Nick Cullinan from the tape gallery believe even Andy's TV ads should be seen as art the turning point for Warhol was the shooting wasn't it I mean can you gives you a bit of a sense of the scope of what he was doing later in his life in the 70s and the 80s well I think throughout the 70s and the 80s you see a widening of his practice so he picks up making paintings again but he does that longer making films but then dabbling in a whole realm of activities what's he doing here is this a this is his ad for TDK the tape firm that he made for Japan and so you see him performing his trademark Warhol persona with the fright wig that's kind of deadpan persona acha Midori what's this doing in an art gallery cuz you know there are ads on telly the whole time but we don't privilege them and say this is a work of art why does this want to work about well this one's special because this is an artist making an ad for telly and the thing is that we wanted to show his paintings his works of art that you see there for example alongside these activities pure day imagine and what do you say to people who might be a bit like God isn't this Emperor's New Clothes I mean come on I can see how paintings are work of art resculpt sure but TV ads he probably got big check for doing that she probably got a bigger check for the painting well that's true I think the thing is that perhaps we moved beyond the idea that artists can only make paintings or artists have to be sincere they have to suffer artists can now thanks to Warhol inhabit a whole different realm of activities and personas so that's what we wanted to look at I think that's Andy Warhol's indisputable legacy he threw open the doors and now in art anything goes he may indeed have sold out in later life and bought into the celebrity circus who can even question his motivations but there's no denying the incredible impact his workers had on our modern world one person who's never doubted Warhol's brilliance is the movie star Dennis Hopper a lifelong friend Hopper's a keen artist as well as an actor I've come to meet him at an exhibition of his paintings and photographs dominating the room is hoppers painting of Andy alongside is a collection of intimate photographs from the factory days okay so this is Andy Gregory markopolos Taylor me Jeremy Langan Jack Smith I mean why was he so drawn to doing this thing of you know the repetition yeah our media with all the media that we have today it is like repetition especially now that we have 24-hour news man I mean how many times could Michael Jackson died I mean it's just on anterior life he'd be making work about there crying baby he's being repetitive better than me but you know we're talking about whether he's a prophet I mean you know to me that seems like he really is looking forward and for telling what's gonna happen you understand I don't think it's so much I don't think art is so much about foretelling what's going to happen is recording your own time what's happening in your time and maybe when I say Duchamp said that the artist of the future will be a person who points his finger he won't be a painter and you'll say that's art and it'll be art doesn't matter how it gets on the canvas or how it gets there that that the artist says it's art now how do you become an artist okay but Andy was an artist and so and and and to me he did finger-point our society the soup can the cartoon the disasters the electric chair our morals I mean everything is like you know pretty much our consumer reality it's all it's all and it's all and Andy's word in 1986 and he created quite a somber series of self-portraits that lots of people described as looking a bit like death masks and he did died the following year just from a routine operation he was only 58 but you know for me and he completely redefined the role of the artist just look at what he achieved and you see that he genuinely changed our forever he told us that you know something like a portrait can tell us as much about ourselves about our own obsessions and desires about our media-saturated age as it could about the sitter or he took things really banal humble objects like a can of tomato soup or a brillo box the kind of stuff you pick up in a supermarket and made it questioned the very nature of art he took art out of the gallery and into the world around us into so many different fields like music or film or publishing even and in doing that he freed up other artists to do exactly the same and of course more than any other artist Andy Warhol was obsessed with pointing out how much we're in thrall to celebrity he told us who we are and what we would become and showed us that art can illuminate these things he was pointing the finger at all of us if you'd like to find out more about the art and the influence of Matisse Picasso Dali and Warhol then go online to BBC co uk coming up next tonight here on BBC HD the last in our series Maps power plunder and possession that's in a few moments and then at 11:00 an electric prom from the incomparable Dame Shirley Bassey

Channel: MIKOS

Views: 284,844

Keywords: History, Documentary, Television Show, Culture, Season 2, Painting, Drawing, Pablo Picasso (Painter), Artist, Drawings, Paint (Visual Art Medium), Sculpture, Museum, Paintings, Artwork, Abstract, Painters, Pablo, Picasso, Famous, famous artists, Documentary Film (TV Genre), girls, women, fashion, Genius, Architecture, Architectural, Surrealistic M.L. Pappas, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Dali, Matisse, Fashion, Design, Contemporary, Artists, Portrait, Sketch, Followart, Henri Matisse, Warhol

Id: x-VFhb-oxHU

Length: 58min 12sec (3492 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2013