Andy Warhol was born three times: the first
to his parents, as Andy Warhola. The second time as a commercial artist, Raggedy
Andy. After a failed assassination, he was reborn
the final time, as the artistic paragon and cultural revolutionary remembered worldwide
as Andy Warhol. Child number four to a poor immigrant family,
raised in a tenement building during the Great Depression, the story of Andy is the story
of the American dream itself- with a little extra obsession, drugs, and murder sprinkled
on top, perfect for his Hollywood heart. Bringing Modern Art to the Modern Age It is impossible to overstate his contributions,
not just to painting, but to the entire science of seeing. The idea that a mass-market object could be
elevated to the status of art just by how it's looked at is such a profound rejection
of every standard which came before it that we no longer even recognize it as revolutionary,
it has been internalized whole-cloth as The New Truth: The audience decides what is art.. Just as much as democracy is a rejection of
the divine right of kings, Andy's contributions to the American perspective are so ingrained
that we no longer recognize them as his. Art is attention. “In the future we’ll all be famous for
15 minutes,” Warhol said that. The term "superstar" is one he coined, to
describe the hippies and drag queens he used for camera fodder. Andy understood better than any of his contemporaries
that what the public wants is to be told that they matter, that the trappings of consumer
culture are part of a grander narrative. Even in television and movies, every behind
the scenes feature pits heroic creatives against the evil studio money-men. It's not enough to enjoy a piece of entertainment,
the work itself must be the product of this titanic struggle or it doesn't have any weight
to it. The drama gives it significance, no one would
remember Firefly if it wasn't defined by the conflict between Joss Wheadon and a bunch
of nameless executives who loved blowing huge opportunities. That's the drama which inspired Andy to paint
Liza Minelli as her career and marriage began to crumble. That's why he painted his Death & Disaster
series, one of which holds the record for Warhol's most expensive work [Show Silver
Car Crash on screen]. America loves an underdog, and there is no
bigger underdog than the victim in a fight against yourself. It's our hunger for celebrities which drives
their self-destruction, and here Andy comes along, turning a silk screened headshot into
the kind of icon they build chapels around, equal parts relic and lecture on the cyclical
hazard of icon worship. The same hazard which would later temporarily
cost him his life. A Pale Boy from Pittsburg Andy grew up in the shadow of the St. John
Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, which is known for its huge and ornate wall of gold-leafed
icons. [Show icons] With their unreadably beatific
expressions and similar poses, this became the genesis for Andy's experimentation with
repeated images. The worshipful quality of his portraits, how
the use of color elevates the mortal to the eternal, everything is here. You can trace every single one of his artistic
motifs to this one place. There's a direct line between spending eight
hours a week in church, staring at a gold-leafed image of Mary and then thirty years later,
painting Marilyn Monroe on top of more gold leaf. The conflation of consumption and worship
is rampant in Warhol's work, because that is the language America uses to express desire
and reverence. They eat what they worship, celebrity is Communion. Success in America is being incorporated into
the greater whole, like how the calcium in milk becomes bone and teeth. Andy is the calcium of modernity, that’s
why is hair was white.. In the third grade, he had to take a temporary
leave of absence when a nerve disease named St. Vitus' Dance plagued him with involuntary
muscle spasms. He would struggle to write his name on the
chalkboard and other children would bully him so much that he simply refused to return. It's this period of affliction and sickness
in which the seeds of Warhol's genius sprout. To keep him occupied, his mother provided
him with Hollywood magazines, newsletters from fan groups, and plenty of paper for experimentation,
going so far as to build a darkroom in the basement for his photography. Warhol began collecting autographed pictures,
with his Shirley Temple as the jewel of the set. To incentivize creation, his mother would
provide a piece of chocolate for every completed work of art. This motivation clearly stuck with Andy, because
after he recovered, he continued taking art classes through elementary and high school,
pursuing a college degree at Carnegie Mellon in commercial art. Success is a Job in New York After graduating in 1949, Andy Warhola moved
to New York City. He was always withdrawn, even before making
it a central part of his public persona. A shy boy with a large nose and an inconsistent
complexion, which he would later attempt to address through surgery. He was insecure about everything but his talents. He quickly attracted respect from the art
directors at magazines for his technical skills, and the unique appeal of his self-developed
"blotted line technique," a style of simple printmaking using a wet ink drawing pressed
against transfer paper. Perhaps more so even than his art, Andy developed
a reputation for being, well, weird. In addition to his physical uniqueness, his
clothes were tattered, his shoes broken-in, and his art was delivered in crumpled paper
bags, rather than professional portfolios. In a phrase, he stuck out. Glamour Magazine was the first to commission
him to illustrate shoes for an article titled "What is Success?" Perhaps accidentally, he was credited as Warhol,
and his rebirth as a commercial artist was complete. His whimsical style soon won him contracts
with Vogue, Columbia Records, and Tiffany & Co. His upwards trajectory only increased when,
in 1952, his mother arrived on the stoop of his apartment to inform him that she had sold
the family house. Almost immediately, they start collaborating
on commercial works as well as art books for friends. She designed and hand-wrote a record label
for New York busker icon Moondog which even won an award. No matter how much Andy may have worried about
his mother embarrassing him in front of his trendy friends, they lived and worked together
for the next 20 years, until her death. As hardworking as her son was, her unique
eye and flowing script helped refine the style that brought him so much praise and success. However, this wasn't enough for the ambitious
young artist. More than security, he wanted to be respected
for his talents, and even admired. He wanted the world to know why he mattered. Boys & Other Headaches It's around this flourishing point in his
career that Andy comes to grips with his same-sex attraction, even if fulfilling his ambitions
proved difficult. His first kiss didn't come until 25, and he
wasn't able to perform the rest of that night's duties. After being rejected during a trip to Honolulu,
he complained to a friend that he had "gone around the world with a boy and not even received
one kiss." Most biographers are content to say that he
was gay in an era where that could get you arrested, but the truth is somewhat more convoluted. The difficulty Warhol had with relationships
and the consummation thereof, as well as his habit of incorporating voyeurism and celibacy
into his creative process, has inspired much academic speculation as to his possible asexuality. He himself claimed to be a virgin in 1980,
though this is contradicted by testimony from former lovers and that time he sought treatment
for an STD in 1960. It's an extremely Andy Warhol move to saturate
your life and work with sex, only to deny its ultimate power. Negating sex in an era where it had never
been more ubiquitous was just another way in which he stood out from the crowd, an observer
of the culture chasing his every move. 15 Rejections Based on the Friendship of Truman
Capote For those of you unfamiliar with New York's
publishing scene in the 1950s, Truman Capote was a young literary hotshot who was in the
process of blowing everyone's mind by somehow managing to succeed in writing strictly on
merit alone, instead of a college alumni network and someone elses’ money. He was stylishly gay, beloved by the art world,
and Andy Warhol wanted to be him. He started leaving little illustrations in
Capote's mailbox. It eventually escalated to Warhol waiting
outside his door, hoping to develop a friendship through sheer insistence. It didn't work. Capote rejected him, later describing him
as "one of those hopeless people you know nothing ever's going to happen to" and "a
hopeless, born loser." A rejection like that can sure make a fellow
appreciate being ghosted. Undaunted, Warhol turned this rejection into
fuel for his first fine art show, 15 Drawings Based on the Works of Truman Capote. Despite being masterful works of flowing,
unbroken lines, none sold. This set the pattern for his early forays
into fine art, on the rare occasions he managed to earn gallery space. In the sharpest possible contrast to his continued
success as a commercial illustrator, gallery owners and art dealers refused to help him
sell his work. Before he dismantled it utterly, there was
a fairly substantial barrier between commercial and fine artists, [said while maintaining
eye contact] because people lucky enough to succeed in fine arts don't need to work for
a living. [Intentional, awkward pause.] Thankfully, that's no longer the case today. [Even longer, even more intentional awkward
pause.] But even moreso than that, Andy was gay and
off-putting in a city that eats weakness. Granted, "too gay for the New York art scene"
sounds like the setup for a joke where the punchline is Louis CK masturbating, but this
was absolutely the case in the 50s. Then, the city was ruled by Jackson Pollock
and his band of whiskey-soaked heterosexual abstract impressionists. That's what art dealers and buyers wanted,
when Warhol showed up with his second collection of ink drawings, Studies for a Boy Book, there
was simply no market for his kind of obsession. It scared people. But no matter how good his work was, everywhere
Warhol went, he was rejected for being too swish, too camp, too weird, those same traits
which would soon bring him more fame and admirers than he could handle. Pop and Circumstance While Warhol is the most widely known Pop
artist, he hardly invented the genre. He was inspired most directly by the work
of James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein, who both rose to prominence painting flat
representations of advertisements and other cultural detritus. Warhol set to work immediately, painting scenes
taken from Nancy cartoons and comic book wig advertisements. The work was not popular, even with Andy. There's a period of approximately fourteen
months between Warhol's decision to pursue fine art, and his first major success. In 1961, he painted two versions of a Coca-Cola
bottle, one full of the brush strokes and human marks of creation, and the other without. Coca-Cola [2] was as sterile and hard-lined
as a neon sign. No trace of the artist remained, nothing human. In short, it blew the first one out of the
water. His friends called it naked, savage, barren. Nothing of the painting existed between the
message and the audience, no gradients or shadows for the eye to hide in. He had found his style. Soup, There It Is! Murial Latow is the name of the woman who
inspired Andy Warhol to paint 32 cans of Campbell's soup. When he asked her for ideas, she said simply,
"you like money, you should paint pictures of money. you should paint something everyone sees every
day, that everyone recognizes, like a can of soup." For Andy, Campbell's soup was more than just
the kind of convenient meal which didn't interrupt his workflow, it held a deep personal significance. During his childhood, his mother suffered
from colon cancer, and had to be hospitalized for six weeks. Everyday she was gone, his older brother would
make him a soup and sandwich, and reassure him that his mother would be okay. That's what these cans represent, that's what
they're inspired by, a sobbing child desperate to believe that his mother will be okay, taking
their daily ritual of soup. Consumption becomes reverence, and through
his tithe, his mother was restored to him. I was not exaggerating when I said that Andy
painted religious icons, I think to him, the soup can was a symbol of resurrection. It certainly resurrected his career, Warhol
painted one portrait of each available variety of Campbell's soup, and when they displayed
in a Hollywood gallery, he brought the Pop Art movement to the west coast. Instead of waiting for the world of fine art
to accept him, he battered down the doors instead. Taming the Silver Silkscreen August 1962 marks another revolution in his
career, the incorporation of drawn and photographed silkscreens in his paintings. The inconsistencies of his blotted lines are
replaced, almost overnight, with the divine accidents of an artistic method reduced to
assembly line efficiency. He focuses first on Hollywood icons from his
youth, followed by stars in decline, like Liza Minnelli. Andy got started on his series of Marilyn
Monroe paintings the same day she died, and eventually debuted them to huge public response. Using a still from the 1953 movie Niagara,
Andy took an image of her in the prime of her youth and joy, and through countless repeated
silk screenings, eventually slowly transformed the joyful smile into a bitter grimace, the
kind of rictus grin which precedes oblivion. No piece makes this more clear than the Marilyn
Diptych, a sequence of colored portraits juxtaposed next to a row of washed out and incomplete
black and white images, the commentary is obvious. Not only does it resemble a film strip, but
the increasingly vague monochrome transfers really capture how it feels to wear out the
memory of a loved one. It's more than just death, it's the very public
death that only the extremely famous get to live through, the slow relegation to the b-roll
of history. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is also the
era he starts producing and directing his own films. Eight hours of the Empire State Building vanishing
into the night sky, six hours of his boyfriend sleeping, the kind of deliberately impenetrable
stuff that gets modern-day freshmen kicked out of film school. He also produced the campy and unlicensed
Batman Dracula, which is exactly what you imagine. Just two years later, Adam West's knowingly
tongue-in-cheek take on the caped crusader debuts with the POW! BAP! Batman TV and movie shows your parents remember. Though it was only ever displayed in galleries
or as part of shows, these screenings were taking place in New York City and Hollywood
at the height of Warhol's fame, scenes a popular actor like Adam West would absolutely have
access to. The influence is undeniable, and remains a
core part of Batman to this day. Even Superheroes were not beyond the reach
of Warhol. Can't Spell "Factory" Without U! In 1963, Warhol hired a friend to decorate
his new work and party space with mirrors and tinfoil, and the Silver Factory was born. To Warhol, Silver represented both the coming
space age future, and the silver screens of Hollywood's glamorous past. It also represented a mirror and narcissism. In short, it reflects now, it gives us what
we want: Us. His entourage immediately starts using it
as the base of operations for a nearly continuous stream of artistic creation and revelry which
would continue for most of the rest of the decade. It became the de-facto center of the New York
art scene, Bob Dylan would go there, Mick Jagger, Salvadore Dali, Liza Minelli, William
S. Burroughs, even David Bowie called themselves regulars. In one room, people were doing speed. In another, people were filming a music video
for The Velvet Underground. Warhol would be making silk screens in one
corner of the workshop while at the other, drag queens vamped. It was, in every sense, bacchanalian. And just like in the stories of the Bacchantes,
Warhol would find himself torn asunder by the very party he cultivated. Never Trust a Playwright The central irony in the assassination of
Andy Warhol is that he wasn't even the initial target, he was the understudy for his own
death. Valerie Solanis stuffed the guns in her coat
that day, intending to murder her publisher, Maurice Girodas. She waited outside his apartment for three
hours in an unseasonably warm hat and overcoat, but lucky for him, he missed that particular
appointment with Fate. Crestfallen but unwilling to abandon her plans
for the day, she headed next to Warhol's Factory. He knew Valerie as the author of an extremely
graphic anti-male play so violent that he initially suspected her to be a police informant. She believed him to be part of a conspiracy
to steal this script, when instead it had been misplaced. When they arrived in his office, she drew
her two automatic pistols, and wounded Warhol. She was preparing to execute an assistant
when the elevator opened, and she simply fled, turning herself over to police custody several
hours later. She left behind a paper bag at the factory,
containing her address, a backup gun, and a single sanitary napkin. The idea that the assassination of Andy Warhol
was intended as some kind of theatrical performance or social critique has been discussed quite
seriously in academic circles, Valerie's work is obscene and confrontational, including
the much-maligned SCUM Manifesto and the one-woman organization it spawned, the Society for Cutting
Up Men. Shortly thereafter, many other artists, including
Chris Burden and his museum-destroying sculpture Samson, would incorporate gunplay into their
work. For a certain type of New Yorker, the temporary
death of Warhol marked the end of the innocent 60s. The ramifications of the shooting would linger
with Warhol for the rest of his days, which is understandable considering he only survived
because the doctor reached into his chest and hand-massaged his heart. No one jumps back from that without a scar. He was required to wear a surgical girdle
around the operating site, much like the silver screen darlings he so admired in his childhood. Far from being shocked out of his semi-affected
malaise, Warhol seemed to retreat into the unreality of it all, remarking ""Before I
was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected
that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen
in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and
real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television—you
don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since,
I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television." While this brought down the gate on the open-door
factory, Warhol's reputation as a nightclub regular was just getting started. He would spend much of the 70s hobnobbing
with New York royalty in the famed Studio 54, taking it all in as fuel for high-paying
commissions of celebrities, socialites, and an actual Shah. He founded Interview, a celebrity interview
magazine which is still being published. For a normal person, that's a huge amount
of work. Most people never even get to paint a vizier,
let alone a full Shah, but for the creator of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the orgy-cum-art
show which inspired "The Rave," it must have felt like a living retirement. Rather than spending the final decade of his
life resting on the laurels of the man who invented Today, Andy started collaborating
with many young talents in the underground arts scene, including Macklemore's personal
favorite, Basquiat. For those of you who don't recognize the name,
approximately two hundred years ago, Macklemore wrote a song about thrift shops. A shop is like a real life Amazon where they
only carry one type of thing, and it's never what you need. But I digress, Basquiat was a controversial
figure in the art world for his propensity of cranking out a huge number of visually
arresting but thematically opaque works which he would sell for huge amounts of money. How soon the student overtakes the master! His final gallery showing would debut across
the street from the nunnery which houses Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. Fittingly enough, The Last Supper was the
subject matter, something Warhol must have delighted in, because he returned to traditional
brush painting for the first time in twenty years. He and Basquiat produced well over a hundred
works, including Ten Punching Bags, which features the face of Jesus painted across,
you guessed it, ten punching bags. Warhol still holds the record for most works
displayed on a single subject. In February of 1987, he died while recovering
from what should have been routine gallbladder surgery. The public wake shut down large portions of
New York and Pittsburgh, where he was buried next to his parents. He was 58. For someone who had lived through so much,
the depression, World War 2, an assassination, dying due to a moment's accidental neglect
feels anticlimactic. Unfinished, like a silk screen with too little
paint.
