Andy Warhol, a brief history ...
Andy Warhol. Born Pittsburgh, 6th August 1928. Died New
York, 22nd February 1987
Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh. He received
his B.F.A. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh,
in 1949. That same year, he moved to New York, where he soon became
successful as a commercial artist and illustrator. During the
1950s, Warhol’s drawings were published in Glamour and other
magazines and displayed in department stores. He became known for
his illustrations of I. Miller shoes. In 1952, the Hugo Gallery in
New York presented a show of Warhol’s illustrations for Truman
Capote’s writings. He travelled in Europe and Asia in 1956.
By the early 1960s, Warhol began to paint comic-strip characters
and images derived from advertisements; this work was characterized
by repetition of banal subjects such as Coca-Cola bottles and soup
cans. He also painted celebrities at this time. Warhol’s new
painting was exhibited for the first time in 1962, initially at the
Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, then in a solo exhibition at the Stable
Gallery, New York. By 1963, he had substituted a silkscreen process
for hand painting. Working with assistants, he produced series of
disasters, flowers, cows, and portraits, as well as
three-dimensional facsimile Brillo boxes and cartons of other
well-known household products.
Starting in the mid-1960s, at The Factory, his New York studio,
Warhol concentrated on making films that were marked by repetition
and an emphasis on boredom. In the early 1970s, he began to paint
again, returning to gestural brushwork, and produced monumental
portraits of Mao Tse-tung, commissioned portraits, and the Hammer
and Sickle series. He also became interested in writing: his
autobiography, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back
Again), was published in 1975, and The Factory published Interview
magazine. A major retrospective of Warhol’s work organized by the
Pasadena Art Museum in 1970 travelled in the United States and
abroad. Warhol died February 22, 1987, in New York.
Extract from Guggenheim museum website
(http://www.guggenheimcollection.org)
Warhol links:
http://www.warhol.org
http://www.warholfoundation.org
http://www.warhols.com
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