Andy Warhol Portfolios: Life & Legends

The exhibition Andy Warhol Portfolios: Life & Legends features selections from Andy Warhol’s forty-year span of work in the art of photographic silk-screen printmaking. While many of the works were made in the 1970s and 1980s, their subject matter—iconic people, trends, and issues—reflects Warhol’s decades-long process of mirroring popular American culture. Warhol transforms photographic imagery—from the rather mundane still lifes of fruits to portraits of comic characters and endangered species—through color, design, form, and multiples. Due to the infinite possibilities of printmaking, Warhol’s portfolios contain a vast array of techniques, ranging from collage and drawing to the use of diamond dust and color variation. Warhol was extremely interested in color, and his personal library contained many books on the great modern colorists, including: Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and Joseph Albers. Warhol mixed colors, but he also used them straight. In the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol worked with assistants and printers to create the print portfolios Sunset, Grapes, Space Fruit: Still Lifes, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Myths, Endangered Species, and others. The color choices in these series were very important to the artist. For the Sunset series, Warhol originally created 632 prints of the sun, each with a different combination of colors combinations. In the Myths and Grapes series, Warhol used a glittery substance called diamond dust to draw attention to the surface and to create changes in the colors of the prints. In the Endangered Species series, he used bright and complementary combinations of colors to draw attention to the animals and their plight. Filmmaker, photographer, painter, commercial illustrator, music producer, writer, and even fashion model—Warhol was a true radical in his approach to art. The breadth and significance of his influence has made him one of the most important artists of our time. He challenged traditional boundaries of art practice, blurring the lines between art, business, and life. He turned everyday life into art and art into a way to live the everyday—collecting, documenting, reproducing, experimenting and collaborating with the people, places, and things around him. Warhol’s enthusiasm for life was rivaled only by his love for the methods of capturing it. He loved the framing device—the camera, the silk-screen, the empty box, the tape recorder, the shopping bag, the telephone—as much as the content it framed. Perhaps Warhol’s greatest innovation was that he saw no limits to his practice. His pop sensibility embraced an anything-can-be-art approach—appropriating images, ideas, and even innovation itself. Biography Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents were Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants named Andrej and Julia Warhola. They had three sons, and Andy was the youngest. Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family members attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father worked as a laborer, and his mother was a homemaker and craftswoman. Encouraged by his mother, Warhol showed an early interest in art and took free art classes at the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art) while in grade school. In addition to drawing, Andy liked Hollywood movies, and when he had the money, he would frequent the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. He enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself, in the basement of his family’s home. Because Andy Warhol’s talent was apparent very early, his father began to save money to pay for his college education while he was still in grammar school. Andrej Warhola died after an extended illness the same year that Andy entered high school, 1942. The following few years were challenging for the Warhola family. Julia was diagnosed with cancer, but recovered after an operation and extended bed rest. During this time, Andy took care of his mother after school, and his brother Paul came back from the Navy to help at home and to work on a night shift. Despite hardships, Warhol graduated from high school and went on to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) from 1945 to 1949, his tuition paid for by his father’s life savings. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. Warhol began his commercial career with an illustration published in Glamour magazine in September 1949. During the 1950s, Warhol became a successful illustrator and won numerous awards. He had a unique, whimsical style of drawing, in which he used a blotted-line technique. In 1952, Julia Warhola moved to New York to take care of her son, who soon enlisted her florid, old-world penmanship in the texts for his illustrations. In 1957, Warhol published a book of her cat drawings, titled Holy Cats by Andy Warhol’s Mother. She lived with Andy in New York until shortly before her death, in 1972. In the late 1950s, Warhol began to devote more energy to painting. He made his first pop paintings, which he based on comics and ads, in 1961. The following year marked the beginning of Warhol’s celebrity due to his Campbell’s Soup Can series; movie star portraits, including, Marilyn, Elvis, and Liz (Elizabeth Taylor); and his series of Death and Disaster paintings. Between 1963 and 1968, Warhol worked with his “superstar” performers and various other people to create hundreds of films. These films, both scripted and improvised, ranged from conceptual experiments and simple narratives to short portraits and features; they include Empire (1964), The Chelsea Girls (1966), and the Screen Tests (1964–1966). The first exhibition of Warhol’s sculptures was held in 1964. It included hundreds of replicas of supermarket-product boxes, including boxes for Brillo and Heinz products. For the occasion, he premiered his new studio, which was painted silver and was known as “the Factory.” It quickly became “the” place to be in New York. Working with other artists, musicians, poets, and creative thinkers who hung out in his studio, Warhol expanded into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. This performance featured the Velvet Underground, a rock band that Warhol managed. Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas in June 1968. He was seriously wounded and, as a result, underwent a series of surgeries. He spent six months recuperating, and the art world assumed that he had given up painting and filmmaking to devote himself to socializing and publishing. Conversely, Warhol did some of his most ambitious work during the 1970s, including monumental paintings, prints, and drawings of the leader of communist China, Mao Zedong, and his multidisciplinary work increased. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he produced paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings, including the Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, and Camouflage series. In 1974, Warhol started a series of Time Capsules, cardboard boxes that he filled with such materials of his everyday life as mail, photographs, art, clothing, and collectibles. The artist produced over six hundred of them over his lifetime and they are now an archival gold mine of his life and times. Documented in the Time Capsules is Warhol’s incredible social life with friends as such Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote. In the 1970s, Warhol received hundreds of commissions for painted portraits of wealthy socialites, musicians, and stars, including the portrait series of Mohammed Ali found in this exhibition. Celebrity portraits were a significant aspect of his career and a main source of income. Other business ventures in publishing increased his image and access to celebrities. He was a cofounder of Interview magazine, which focused on film, fashion, and popular culture. He also authored or coauthored many books, among them, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), Exposures (1979), POPism (1980), and America (1985)—some of which were based on transcribed conversations, often from recordings taped by Warhol at parties or while on the telephone. In 1984, Warhol collaborated with the young artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. Warhol returned to painting with a brush for these artworks, briefly abandoning the silk-screen method he had used exclusively since 1962. In the mid-1980s, his television shows?Andy Warhol’s T.V. and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes?were broadcast on a local cable station in New York and nationally on MTV. He created work for Saturday Night Live, appeared in an episode of The Love Boat, and produced music videos for rock bands such as the Cars. Warhol also signed with a few modeling agencies and appeared in fashion shows and numerous print and television ads. Warhol’s final two exhibitions were his series of Last Supper paintings, shown in Milan, and his Sewn Photos (multiple prints of identical photos sewn together in a grid), exhibited in New York. Both shows opened in January 1987, one month before his death. Andy Warhol died unexpectedly on February 22, 1987, from complications following gallbladder surgery