The Factory: Andy Warhol's Studio and Hip Hangout · Lomography 2013-02-21 1 13 Share Tweet Ever wondered where Andy Warhol conceptualized and made his iconic Pop art masterpieces? Allow us to take you back in time and into The Factory, Warhol’s New York City studio and hip haven where all the action happened and his so-called Superstars inspired him. Andy Warhol, the boss of the Factory. Photo via Dear Dear Chicago on Wordpress Between 1962 and 1984, Andy Warhol had three different locations for his studio: the fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan, the sixth floor of the Decker Building at 33 Union Square West, and 22 East 33rd Street. It was where his workers would make lithographs and assemble silkscreens, making its moniker as “The Factory” very apt. However, these weren’t the only things Warhol’s studio was used for. While silkscreening was being done in one area, screen testing and filming would be done in another.

These screen tests, a series of silent film portraits, featured Factory regulars, celebrities, friends, guests, or anyone else Warhol thought had “star potential.” Warhol at work in the Factory. Photo via Artpedia on Tumblr The original Factory was called by its frequent visitors as the Silver Factory for its tin foil wrappings, silver paint, and also the silver balloons Warhol brought in and left floating around the ceiling. It was decorated by Warhol’s friend, Billy Name, whose apartment was decorated the same way. The Pop artist liked how it was done and asked his friend to do the same for his studio. The Factory was more than just the place where Warhol worked; it was also his breeding ground of ideas, where he surrounded himself with a menagerie of people who served as his inspirations, collaborators, and movie stars: fellow artists, musicians, actresses, socialites, drug addicts, drag queens, free thinkers, and many others. All of them later came to be known as Warhol’s Superstars. Party at The Factory. Warhol’s studio was also often called The Silver Factory by his frequent visitors because of its silver paint and tin foil decorations.

Photo via Crushable.com Warhol would also often hold parties in The Factory, much to the dismay of his landlord . Even so, these parties gained his studio its reputation as a hip hangout, one of the places to be in the 1960s. If you were invited in one of these Factory parties, you were probably close to the famed artist or someone with “star quality.” You must be curious about what a busy day (or night) was like for Andy Warhol, his Factory, and his Superstars, so without further ado, allow us to walk you through some photos of the renowned Pop artist’s equally iconic studio: Pop Art - the art of popular culture Pop Art Pop Art - The Art of Popular Culture ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997) 'Whaam!', 1963 (oil and acrylic resin on canvas) Pop Art was the art of popular culture. It was the visual art movement that characterised a sense of optimism during the post war consumer boom of the 1950's and 1960's. It coincided with the globalization of pop music and youth culture, personified by Elvis and the Beatles.

Pop Art was brash, young and fun and hostile to the artistic establishment. It included different styles of painting and sculpture from various countries, but what they all had in common was an interest in mass-media, mass-production and mass-culture. British Pop Art EDUARDO PAOLOZZI (1924- 2005) 'I was a Rich Man's Plaything' , 1947 (collage) The word 'POP' was first coined in 1954, by the British art critic Lawrence Alloway, to describe a new type of art that was inspired by the imagery of popular culture. Alloway, alongside the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, was among the founding members of the Independent Group, a collective of artists, architects, and writers who explored radical approaches to contemporary visual culture during their meetings at ICA in London between 1952 and 1955. They became the forerunners to British Pop art. At their first meeting Paolozzi gave a visual lecture entitled 'Bunk' (short for 'bunkum' meaning nonsense) which took an ironic look at the all-American lifestyle.

This was illustrated by a series collages created from American magazines that he received from GI's still resident in Paris in the late 1940s. 'I was a Rich Man's Plaything', one of the 'Bunk' series, was the first visual artwork to include the word 'POP'. 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' 1956 (collage) Some young British artists in the 1950’s, who grew up with the wartime austerity of ration books and utility design, viewed the seductive imagery of American popular culture and its consumerist lifestyle with a romantic sense of irony and a little bit of envy. They saw America as being the land of the free - free from the crippling conventions of a class ridden establishment that could suffocate the culture they envisaged: a more inclusive, youthful culture that embraced the social influence of mass media and mass production. Pop Art became their mode of expression in this search for change and its language was adapted from Dada collages and assemblages. The Dadaists had created irrational combinations of random images to provoke a reaction from the establishment of their day.

British Pop artists adopted a similar visual technique but focused their attention on the mass imagery of popular culture which they waved as a challenge in the face of the establishment. Richard Hamilton’s collage of 1956, ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?’ is the ultimate catalogue of pop art imagery: comics, newspapers, advertising, cars, food, packaging, appliances, celebrity, sex, the space age, television and the movies. A black and white version of this collage was used as the cover for the catalogue of the 'This Is Tomorrow' exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. This show heralded a widening of our understanding of what culture is and inspired a new generation of young British artists that included Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Joe Tilson, Derek Boshier, Richard Smith and R.B Kitaj. JASPER JOHNS (1930-) 'White Flag', 1955 (encaustic, oil, newspaper, charcoal on canvas) Pop art in America evolved in a slightly differently way to its British counterpart.

American Pop Art was both a development of and a reaction against Abstract Expressionist painting. Abstract Expressionism was the first American art movement to achieve global acclaim but, by the mid-1950's, many felt it had become too introspective and elitist. American Pop Art evolved as an attempt to reverse this trend by reintroducing the image as a structural device in painting, to pull art back from the obscurity of abstraction into the real world again. This was a model that had been tried and tested before. Picasso had done something similar forty years previously when he collaged 'real world' printed images onto his still lifes, as he feared that his painting was becoming too abstract. Around 1955, two remarkable artists emerged who would lay the foundations of a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the forerunners of American Pop Art. JASPER JOHNS (1930-) 'Numbers in Color', 1958-59 (encaustic and newspaper on canvas) Jasper Johns' early artworks question how we look at, perceive and make art.

He does not distinguish between subject and object in his work, or art and life for that matter. In his eyes they are both the same thing. Johns believes that we should not look upon a painting as a representation or illusion but as an object with its own reality. Like the forerunners of British Pop Art, Johns was influenced by Dada ideas, in particular the 'readymades' (found objects) of Marcel Duchamp, whose bottle racks and bicycle wheels challenged the definition of the art object. However, it was not 'found objects' that Johns introduced as a subject for his paintings, but ‘found images’ - flags, targets, letters and numbers - and it was this iconography of familiar signs that appealed to Pop. He saw them as "pre-formed, conventional, depersonalised, factual, exterior elements." Johns' depersonalized images provided an antidote to the obscure personal abstraction of late Abstract Expressionism. His use of such neutral icons offered him a subject that was immediately recognisable but so ordinary that it left him free to work on other levels. His subjects provided him with a structure upon which he could explore the visual and physical qualities of his medium. The results were a careful balance between representation and abstraction.

Johns painted in encaustic, an archaic medium that dates from the first century which fuses pigment in hot wax. He combined encaustic with newspaper collage to create a seductive expanse of paint where his sensitive mark-making articulates the surface of the work. His fascination with the overall unity of the surface plane in a picture places him in a tradition that stretches back through Cubism and Cézanne to Chardin. Johns' art plays with visual ideas that have layers of meaning and communicate on various levels. It is both sensual and cerebral - an art about art and the way we relate to it. ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925- 2008) 'Retroactive 1', 1964 (oil and silkscreen on canvas) Robert Rauschenberg also used 'found images' in his art but, unlike Johns' images, they are combined in a relationship with one another or with real objects. The work of both these artists is often referred to as Neo-Dada as it draws on ‘found elements’, first explored by Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters.

Inspired by Schwitters who created collages from the refuse he picked up on the street, Rauschenberg combined real objects, that he found in his New York neighborhood, with collage and painting. He said, “I actually had a house rule. If I walked completely round the block and didn't have enough to work with, I could take one other block and walk around it in any direction – but that was it.” He called these multi-media assemblages ‘combines’, which “had to look at least as interesting as anything that was going on outside the window”. Rauschenberg believed that “painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world”. Collage was Rauschenberg’s natural language and he added to its vocabulary by developing a method of combining oil painting with photographic silkscreen. This allowed him to experiment with contemporary images gathered from newspapers, magazines, television and film which he could reproduce in any size and color as a compositional element on a canvas or print. He used these elements in a way that mirrors our experience of mass-media.

Everyday we are bombarded with images from television, newspapers and magazines, disregarding most but retaining a few that relate, either consciously or subconsciously, to our individual experience and understanding. Rauschenberg's paintings capture this visual 'noise' in a framework of images whose narratives suggest some kind of ironic allegory. Rauschenberg was interested in our changing perception and interpretation of images: "I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended." In 'Retroactive 1', Rauschenberg plays with the way we have read paintings since the early Renaissance. The composition recalls early religious icons where the central figure of Christ or a saint would have been surrounded by some smaller narrative panels. An iconic image of the venerated President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world who was assassinated in the previous year, holds the central position as he forcefully issues a warning. He points to the red image on his right which looks deceptively like Masaccio's 'Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden' c.1432 from the Brancacci Chapel in Florence.

With the symbolic association of 'red' and the mushroom-shaped cloud hovering above the president's head, this could easily be interpreted as a cold war reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis, ironically using a creation allegory to represent the Doomsday scenario. However, Rauschenberg is not that simple. If you look more closely you discover that the red image is not a section of Masaccio's fresco, but a detail from a stroboscopic flash photograph for Life magazine (10/10/1952) by Gjon Mili of a real life reconstruction of a painting by Rauschenberg's mentor: 'Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2' (1912) by Marcel Duchamp. While a single apple is a metaphor for Original Sin in Renaissance paintings of Adam and Eve, in 'Retroactive 1' an astronaut parachutes back to earth only to land in an upturned box of the 'forbidden fruit' - a symbol of how man's potential for evil has multiplied in the modern world (in Latin, the words for 'apple' and 'evil' are identical in their plural form: 'mala').

Rauschenberg extends his metaphor by illustrating in the top right of the painting what the astronaut is returning to: Eden after the Fall - a world polluted by industrialisation. 'Retroactive 1' is a very appropriate title for the work as it relates to a canon of images, events and ideas across time. Warhol - from Celebrities to Soup Cans ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) ‘Marilyn Diptych’, 1962 (silkscreen on canvas) If there was one artist who personified Pop Art it was Andy Warhol. He originally worked as a 'commercial artist' and his subject matter was derived from the imagery of mass-culture: advertising, comics, newspapers, TV and the movies. Warhol embodied the spirit of American popular culture and elevated its imagery to the status of museum art. He used second-hand images of celebrities and consumer products which he believed had an intrinsic banality that made them more interesting. He felt that they had been stripped of their meaning and emotional presence through their mass-exposure.

Typically subverting the values of the art establishment, Warhol was fascinated by this banality which he celebrated in a series of subjects ranging from celebrities to soup cans. Whether it was a painting of 'Campbell's Chicken Noodle' or a 'Car Crash', a portrait of 'Elizabeth Taylor' or the 'Electric Chair', Warhol's detached approach was always the same: "I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better or worse painting." Warhol saw this aesthetic of mass-production as a reflection of contemporary American culture: "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good.

Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." The obvious irony of this statement is that the price of that Coke bottle hits the stratosphere as soon as Warhol signs it. As Cubism stands on the shoulders of Cézanne, Warhol's art is dependant on Duchamp's 'readymades. He was really a Dadaist in spirit - an 'agent provocateur'. His many whimsical proclamations about art were deliberately enigmatic and contrary, avoiding clarification and forcing his audience to speculate on their meaning: "I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked." Warhol's evasive attitude was a strategy, the result of which was self publicity. He cultivated his own image like a business model which was inseparable from his art. He said, "I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art." Warhol was against the idea of skill and craftsmanship as a way of expressing the artist's personality.

He claimed to have removed both craftsmanship and personality from his own art: "The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.............If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There's nothing behind it." His works were produced through the mechanical processes of film and silkscreen printing or made by others in his studio which was called 'The Factory'. Warhol's paradoxical statements such as, "I am a deeply superficial person" or "art should be meaningful in the most shallow way" are echoed in his work. The left hand panel of his ‘Marilyn Diptych’ is a crudely colored photograph of the actress whose sense of 'self' is degraded through the repetition of her image, whereas the right hand panel is a physically degraded black and white image (as the printing ink runs out on the silkscreen) that reflects the ephemeral qualities of fame. Their combined panels are a memorable discourse on the nature of celebrity and its power to both create and destroy its acquaintances.

The 'diptych' format was originally used in medieval painting for religious images of personal devotion, an appropriate choice considering Warhol's fascination for Marilyn Monroe. The work was exhibited in Warhol's first New York exhibition at the Stable Gallery in November 1962, just weeks after Marilyn's death from 'acute barbiturate poisoning'. The Marilyn Diptych, along with his other famous Marilyn paintings, is based on a 1953 publicity photograph for the film 'Niagara' that Warhol purchased only days after she died. Pop Art and the Comic Strip 'The Artist's Studio No. 1 (Look Mickey)', 1973 (oil, acrylic resin and sand on canvas) Roy Lichtenstein developed a pop art style that was based on the visual vernacular of mass-communication: the comic strip. It was a style that was fixed in its format: black outlines, bold colors and tones rendered by Benday dots (a method of printing tones in comic books from the 1950's and 60's).

What actually changed through the development of Lichtenstein's art was his subject matter which evolved from comic strips to an exploration of modernist art styles: Cubism, Futurism, Art Deco, De Stijl, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Roy Lichtenstein's early work had a hint of Americana - "Expressionistic Cubism ....of cowboys and Indians" was how he put it - but it was still based on the painterly conventions that he had been taught to respect. Bored with the glut of Expressionist feeling that was around at the time, Lichtenstein attacked this sagging tradition with paintings like 'Look Mickey' (1961), a large scale cartoon image which "was done from a bubble gum wrapper" (a detail of this work can be seen in 'The Artist's Studio No.1', 1973). His comic strip images had an initial shock value, but like much of Pop they were quickly embraced by the galleries and collectors. Lichtenstein remarked, "It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it.......everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody was accustomed to this.

The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn't hate that enough, either." The hard-edged commercial style of Lichtenstein's comic book paintings was an antidote to the incoherent splashes of late Abstract Expressionism, but it was not simply intended as an act of Pop/Dada protest, "I don't think that Pop would have existed without Dada having existed before it, but I don't really think that Pop is Dada. I don't think that I look on my work as being anti-art or anything that's different from the mainstream of painting since the Renaissance." Although there is an element of irony and humor in Lichtenstein's style, his work lies within the classical tradition of control in the use of line, shape, tone and color as compositional elements. The discipline of the work is cerebral with little left to impulse or emotion or what he calls 'the character of art'. "My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it can be read that way........People mistake the character of line for the character of art.

But it’s really the position of line that’s important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it." Lichtenstein does not exactly copy his comic book images; he subtly refines them, conscious of their transformed appearance on a larger scale and aware of their aesthetic interpretation within the context of the museum. (You can get an idea of this effect on David Barsalou's Lichtenstein Project .) As his style developed he move away from using the imagery of comics to interpreting modernist art styles, but still in his comic book vernacular. Lichtenstein was able to maintain this singular style for over thirty five years, not simply by varying his subject matter, but by viewing his art as an independent entity with an existence and development that he controlled, "I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me." CLAES OLDENBURG (1922-), COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN (1942-2009) ‘Spoonbridge and Cherry’ photo: Mike Hicks, 1985-88 (alluminium, stainless steel and paint) Claes Oldenburg was the Pop Artist who gravitated towards sculpture more than any of his contemporaries.

At the start of 1960's he was involved in various 'Happenings': spontaneous, improvised, artistic events where the experience of the participants was more important than an end product - a kind of consumer art encounter for a consumer culture. Oldenburg found his inspiration in the imagery of consumer merchandise, "I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol Art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L & M art, Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art." In 1961 he opened 'the Store' where he sold plaster replicas of fast foodstuff and junk merchandise whose crudely painted surfaces were an obvious parody of Abstract Expressionism. He used the front shop of 'The Store' as a gallery while he replenished his stock from his studio in the back shop.

Oldenburg's work is full of humorous irony and contradiction: on one hand he makes hard objects like a bathroom sink out soft sagging vinyl, while on the other he makes soft objects like a cheeseburger out of hard painted plaster. He also subverts the relative size of objects by taking small items like the spoon and cherry above and recreating them on an architectural scale. He said, "I like to take a subject and deprive it of its function completely." By undermining the form, scale and function of an object Oldenburg contradicts its meaning and forces the spectator to reassess its presence. When you see his large scale public works in their environmental settings, they have a powerful surrealist quality like Gulliver at Brobdingnag. Claes Oldenburg has collaborated with Dutch/American pop sculptor Coosje van Bruggen since 1976. They were married in 1977. Coosje van Bruggen died in January, 2009. Pop Art Notes If those walls could talk. Andy Warhol's last "Factory," the old Consolidated Edison substation on New York City's 33rd Street and Madison Avenue, is available for lease or purchase.

The building, which Warhol kept until his death in 1987, is mostly rented out for individual events. It has four floors, a dozen skylights, nearly 31,000 square feet and exposed brick. Warhol used the space as a studio as well as for the headquarters of the once cutting-edge Interview magazine. After Warhol died, the contents of the Factory were sold off at an auction for a reported $25 million, most of which went to charity. The building isn't the only Warhol real estate on the market: Eothen, the Montauk, Long Island, property Warhol bought with partner Paul Morrissey, is for sale for $50 million and earned a spot on Forbes.com's list of the most expensive homes in America . notes Warhol and Modernism What for years modernists had deliberately ignored or contemptuously spurned, Warhol embraced. As appropriated mass-culture images—such as his Turquoise Marilyn (1962)—his "art" was indistinguishable from advertising—meaning it was crass and pedestrian—and thus lampooned the modern emphasis on noble sentiment and good taste .

No doubt Warhol's comments about art, that it should be effortless, that it's a business having nothing to do with transcendence, truth, or sentiment, also infuriated detractors. -- Alan R. Pratt Andy Warhol’s "Camp" Camp (1965) - Andy Warhol Andy Warhol’s 1965 response to Susan Sontag’s famous essay defining "camp" won my heart at the outset when its cast members (including Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga, and Jack Smith) start by discussing summer camps they’ve attended. Filmed at Warhol’s New York studio, the Factory, against walls covered with silver foil, each person presents a performance illustrating his or her idea of camp. Malanga reads a poem about public sex acts he’s engaged in; Smith comes "out of the closet " by creating a powerfully restrained, near-static mini drama that climaxes with the opening of a closet that contains a little Batman figure. Unlike the later Warhol films directed by Paul Morrissey, this has the raw, improvised, mistake-filled look of much of Warhol’s early art.

One can see the random effects that inspired later filmmakers and performance artists, happy accidents like a crew member repeatedly adjusting a microphone within the frame or absurd stylistic elements like zooms that only sometimes find a human target. Most memorably Tally Brown explains, "I don’t think anybody’s camping. I think we’re all doing ourselves." Therein lies Warhol’s implicit quarrel with Sontag: "Camp" is not about momentary poses but about how the roles people assume define their lives. -- Fred Camper, the Chicago Reader In an attempt to define Susan Sontag's nebulous conceit, "camp," Andy Warhol amasses a bunch of performers--some of whom are Factory insiders, some not--to do some, as they used to say in the early sixties, "camping." The highlight is Jack Smith literally coming out of a closet: Smith's combination of smirks, deep but impenetrable but super-visible thoughts, and retardate behavior made him one of the most jaw-dropping performers ever recorded on nitrate. There is literally no one like him; Andy Kaufman's stunts seem like cheap SNL gags in contrast.

Even those jaded jades at the Factory are utterly overwhelmed by his aura of sacredness. The other stuff is fun, too, especially a fat guy who does a routine about "Paranoid Schizophrenics for William F. Buckley, Jr." The one drag: Mario Montez's trannie dance is interrupted by puke-inducing, Austin Powers-style zooms in and out. --Matthew Wilder, imdb.com "I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked." He was one of the most enigmatic figures in American art. His work became the definitive expression of a culture obsessed with images. He was surrounded by a coterie of beautiful bohemians with names like Viva, Candy Darling, and Ultra Violet. He held endless drug- and sex-filled parties, through which he never stopped working. He single-handedly confounded the distinctions between high and low art. His films are pivotal in the formation of contemporary experimental art and pornography. He spent the final years of his life walking around the posh neighborhoods of New York with a plastic bag full of hundred dollar bills, buying jewelry and knick knacks.

His name was Andy Warhol, and he changed the nature of art forever. Andy Warhol's exact birth date is unknown, though one can assume it is between 1927 and 1930. What is known is that he was born to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents in Forest City, Pennsylvania. He was a shy quiet boy, leaving high school to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He received his bachelors of fine arts degree from there in 1949, and headed immediately to New York. In New York, Warhol found design jobs in advertising. Before long he had begun specializing in illustrations of shoes. His work appeared in GLAMOUR, VOGUE, and HARPER'S BAZAAR. In the mid-'50s he became the chief illustrator for I. Miller Shoes, and in 1957 a shoe advertisement won him the Art Director's Club Medal. During this time, Warhol had also been working on a series of pictures separate from the advertisements and illustrations. It was this work that he considered his serious artistic endeavor. Though the paintings retained much of the style of popular advertising, their motivation was just the opposite.

The most famous of the paintings of this time are the thirty-two paintings of Campbell soup cans. With these paintings, and other work that reproduced Coca-Cola bottles, Superman comics, and other immediately recognizable popular images, Warhol was mirroring society's obsessions. Where the main concern of advertising was to slip into the unconscious and unrecognizably evoke a feeling of desire, Warhol's work was meant to make the viewer actually stop and look at the images that had become invisible in their familiarity. These ideas were similarly being dealt with by artists such as Jasper Johns , Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg -- and came to be known as Pop Art. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Warhol produced work at an amazing rate. He embraced a mode of production similar to that taken on by the industries he was mimicking, and referred to his studio as "The Factory." The Factory was not only a production center for Warhol's paintings, silk-screens, and sculptures, but also a central point for the fast-paced high life of New York in the '60s.

Warhol's obsession with fame, youth, and personality drew the most wild and interesting people to The Factory throughout the years. Among the regulars were Mick Jagger, Martha Graham , Lou Reed , and Truman Capote . For many, Warhol was a work of art in himself, reflecting back the basic desires of an consumerist American culture. He saw fame as the pinnacle of modern consumerism and reveled in it the way artists a hundred years before reveled in the western landscape. His oft-repeated statement that "every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes" was an incredible insight into the growing commodification of everyday life. By the mid-'60s Warhol had become one of the most famous artists in the world. He continued, however, to baffle the critics with his aggressively groundbreaking work. Putting aside much of the "pop" imagery, he concentrated on making films. His films, as his paintings had been, were primarily concerned with getting the viewer to look at something for longer than they otherwise would. Using film, Warhol could control the viewer's attention. One of his most famous films, SLEEP (1963), was eight hours of the poet John Giorno asleep in his bed.

Warhol's movement into film directing and production brought him into contact with dozens of artists and actors interested in working in The Factory. One of these was actress and writer Valerie Solanas, who had for some time been trying to get Warhol to produce one of her scripts. In 1968, in anger at Warhol's disinterest, Solanas (the founder and only member of S.C.U.M., the Society for Cutting Up Men), shot and nearly killed Warhol. During Warhol's extended convalescence he began to work on a new mode of art. Considered his "Post-Pop" period, the images were primarily portraits of living superstars. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Warhol produced hundreds of portraits, mostly in silk screen. His images of Liza Minnelli, Jimmy Carter, Albert Einstein , Elizabeth Taylor, and Philip Johnson express a more subtle and expressionistic side of his work. During the final years of his life, Warhol became the hero of another generation of artists, including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente. Their work represents a continuation of an artistic revolution begun by Andy Warhol.

On February 22, 1987, Warhol died of heart failure at his home in New York. Many suggested it was a poorly performed minor surgery he had had earlier that day, while others believed it was due to the general weakening of his body after the shooting. What remains certain is that during the sixty years of whirlwind and mystery that was Andy Warhol's life, the art world (and the world at large) became a more fun and interesting place. Andy Warhol | A Documentary Film | American Masters | PBS A Documentary Film Comments Photo of Andy Warhol by Gretchen Berg. Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room shack-like apartment at 73 Orr Street in the working class neighborhood of Soho in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Andrej Warhola and Julia Zavacky Warhola. The youngest of three sons, Andrew attended Holmes Elementary School and Schenley High School, and entered Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh in 1945, where he studied with Balcomb Greene, Robert Lepper, Samuel Rosenberg, and others.

He experimented with his name, signing holiday cards “André,” and dropping the final “a” from his family name. He graduated in June 1949 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design. Soon after graduating, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. His first work appeared in Glamour magazine in September 1949. Throughout the 1950s, he became one of the most successful illustrators of his time, and won numerous awards for his work from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. His clients included Tiffany & Co., The New York Times, I. Miller Shoes, Bonwit Teller, Columbia Records, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Fleming-Joffe, NBC, and others. Much of his commercial work was based on photographs and other source images, a process he would use for the rest of his life. He also employed the delightfully quirky handwriting of his mother Julia in many of his works in this period.

She won a professional award for her lettering on the LP The Story of Moondog in 1958, and Warhol published a book of her drawings, Holy Cats, in 1957. She was always credited as “Andy Warhol’s Mother.” She left Pittsburgh in 1952 to join her son, and they lived together until about 1971. Warhol painted memorial portraits of her after her death; he also had made a film and shot videotapes of her. In 1956 Warhol traveled around the world for several weeks, visiting many countries in Asia and Europe. In the late 1950s he began to devote more energy to painting. He made his first Pop paintings, based on comics and ads, in 1961, and then a series of Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962. These created a sensation in the art world and launched Warhol as a celebrity. Except for a brief period in the mid-1960s, he would continue to paint until the end of his life. He also extended his talents into other fields such as film, publishing, writing, television, and music.

By the time of his death, he was one of the most prolific and well-known artists the world had ever seen. Warhol had a life-long fascination with Hollywood. In 1962 he began a large series of celebrity portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. He also began his series of “death and disaster” paintings at this time – images of electric chairs, suicides, and car crashes. In 1963 he began to make films, and created many classics of avant-garde cinema over a five-year period, including Sleep (1963), Empire (1963), Kiss (1963-64), and The Chelsea Girls (1966). Warhol made about 600 films from 1963 until 1976, ranging from almost 500 short Screen Tests (4-minute portrait films, from 1963-1966), to **** (a/k/a Four Stars, 1967-68), a twenty-five-hour long film. Between 1968 and 1976, Paul Morrissey directed most of his films, while Warhol was the producer.

Warhol’s first exhibition of sculptures was held in 1964, with hundreds of replicas of large supermarket product boxes, including Brillo Boxes, Heinz Boxes, Del Monte Boxes, Mott’s Boxes, and Kellogg’s Boxes. By this time, his new studio, painted silver and known as the Factory, was becoming the place to be in New York; parties held there were mentioned in gossip columns throughout the country. By the mid-1960s he was a frequent presence in magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and Esquire. In 1965, Warhol was the first artist to exhibit video as art. He loved its immediacy, and eventually filled about 2500 videotapes, including Factory Diaries, Phoney, and others. At an exhibition of his Flowers paintings in Paris in 1965, Warhol publicly announced that he was retiring from painting to pursue filmmaking, although he continued to make editions of fine art prints, and also sculptures. However, he began painting again in 1966.

He broadened his activities into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured the rock and roll band The Velvet Underground. The EPI has been credited by some with the invention of the psychedelic light show as nightclub entertainment. The Velvet Underground went on to become one of the most influential rock bands in history. During this time, Warhol briefly operated a dance club in Manhattan called the Gymnasium, which featured exercise equipment on the dance floor. In 1966 Warhol exhibited Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds at the Leo Castelli Gallery. The Cows were Day-Glo colored, and the Clouds were floating silvery balloons shaped like pillows. Warhol covered the exterior of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet with Cow Wallpaper in 1968. On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967), came into the studio and shot Warhol in the chest, apparently because of a play she had written. He recovered from the near-fatal shooting after a five-hour operation.

While recuperating he painted a large series of portraits of Happy Rockefeller, the wife of the Governor of New York. Warhol self-published a large series of artist’s books in the 1950s, but his first mass-produced book, Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), was published in 1967. He later published a, a novel (1968), Blue Movie (1970), THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), POPism (1980), Exposures (1979), Children’s Book (1983), and America (1985). Party Book (1988), and The Diaries of Andy Warhol (1989) were published posthumously, with the latter becoming a scandalous best-seller. Beginning with a, the technique for most of his writings was transcribed recorded conversations. This method was also used for Warhol’s stage play, Pork, produced in London and New York in 1971. In total, he recorded about 3400 audiotapes.

Warhol closed the 1960s with an unusual exhibition, Raid the Icebox I, which he was invited to choose from the collection of the Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. Rather than the usual masterpieces, Warhol chose damaged paintings in the process of being repaired, the entire collection of historical footwear and parasols, and other unexpected items. At the time, he was developing a very keen eye for antiques; among his discoveries were French Art Deco designs, Native American blankets and pottery, and American Folk Art and cookie jars. Also in that year he co-founded Interview, a magazine devoted to film, fashion, and popular culture that continues to this day. Warhol’s quote, “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” is known throughout the world, and originated in about 1967 or 1968. Interview testified to Warhol’s lifelong obsession with film stars and other contemporary celebrities. In 1971 Warhol co-designed the cover for The Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers, featuring a close-up photo of the torso of a man wearing blue jeans with a real working zipper. The design was nominated for a Grammy Award.

He designed many music LP covers before, beginning in 1949, but in the 1970s he received many more commissions for these designs, which usually consisted of a painted portrait of the recording artist. His commissioned portrait paintings began in 1963, with portraits of the collector Ethel Scull, entertainer Bobby Short, and others. Throughout the 1970s, Warhol frequently socialized with celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote, both of whom had been important early subjects in his art. He started to receive dozens-and soon hundreds-of commissions for painted portraits from wealthy socialites, music and film stars, and other clients. He was a regular partygoer at Studio 54, the famous New York disco, along with celebrities such as fashion designer Halston, entertainer Liza Minnelli, and Bianca Jagger. The 1970s was also a period of experimentation for Warhol. He made 3 versions of a sculpture called Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall) for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970.

These consist of a large shower of water in front of a wall of 3-D lenticular prints of daisies. In the mid-1970s he experimented with an idea for an Invisible Sculpture, made of motion detectors and loud sirens. In 1978, he produced a large series of works called Oxidation paintings, made with human urine on canvases covered with metallic paint. The chemical interaction produced beautiful abstract shapes, in contrast to their shocking medium. Warhol also worked on several ideas for television shows at this time, as well as art works in video, including Water and Fight. In 1974, Warhol started a series of Time Capsules, cardboard boxes that he filled with the materials of his everyday life, including mail, photos, art, clothing, collectibles, etc. The Time Capsules eventually numbered over 600, and are now an archival goldmine of his life and times.

From the 1970s onward, Warhol continued to produce a prolific number of paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings: Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, Camouflage, and many more, culminating in his series of Last Supper paintings, which were shown in Milan in early 1987. He returned to the idea of wallpaper as art, creating Mao (1974), Self-Portrait (1978), and Fish (1984) wallpapers. Fish was part of an environmental work, Paintings for Children, in which his small paintings of Toys were hung at a child’s eyelevel on the wallpaper. His Sewn Photos (multiple prints of identical photos sewn together in a grid) were exhibited in New York in January 1987. In the mid-1980s his television shows, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes and Andy Warhol’s TV, aired nationally on MTV and on Madison Square Garden cable television in New York. He created work for Saturday Night Live, and appeared in an episode of The Love Boat.

He produced music videos for rock bands such as The Cars, and signed with the modeling agencies Ford and Zoli. He modeled in fashion shows, and in numerous print and television ads for Sony, TDK, Vidal Sassoon, and many other companies. In 1984, Warhol collaborated with young artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring on artworks. Warhol returned to painting with a brush in these, briefly abandoning the silkscreen method he had used exclusively since 1962. Nearly all of Warhol’s works in every medium were created with the help of friends (beginning with writer Ralph Ward, and the crowd at Serendipity 3 café in the 1950s), paid assistants (beginning with Vito Giallo and Nathan Gluck in the 1950s), and managers such as Fred Hughes.

Of all of these, the best known are the Superstars – the “underground” actors of his films of the 1960s such as Taylor Mead, Baby Jane Holzer, Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Polk, Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Viva, Joe Dallesandro, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and many others. Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987, due to complications following surgery to remove his gall bladder. In 1988, a ten-day auction of his enormous estate of art and antiques raised over 20 million dollars for The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Andy Warhol Museum was announced in 1989, and opened in Pittsburgh in 1994. –Matt Wrbican, Archivist, The Andy Warhol Museum Art World Abstracts: Warhol’s Go-To Factory Photographer Gets a Show, and More! | Observer Art World Abstracts: Warhol’s Go-To Factory Photographer Gets a Show, and More!

By Nate Freeman • 11/07/14 9:10am Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, by Billy Name. Billy Name was the Warhol superstar who first stuffed The Factory with its signature silver tinsel. He was also taking pictures the whole time, and now Billy Name is getting an exhibition at Milk Studios that features the celebrity-laden snapshots, and there’s a book to come, too. The kids at The Factory came and went, but Billy Name (not his real name) was the real deal. And now Warhols sell for $105 million, and Billy Name runs a goat farm in upstate New York. [ T ] This is the 38-year-old deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia: “In mid-October, Christie’s art expert Xin Li—a former professional basketball star and model from China’s Manchuria region—was escorting billionaire collectors through the Louvre in Paris. Days later, she popped up in Hong Kong to wine and dine tech millionaires at the auction house’s showroom. Now, Ms.

Xin is in New York to field phone bids during the season’s major fall auctions, which started Tuesday and continue through next week.” [ WSJ ] Artists got a “You can’t sit with us” vibe at the Art + Film Gala at LACMA: “Co-chaired by trustee and former fashion designer Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio, entertainment industry figures (Jennifer Lopez, Amy Adams, Jamie Foxx, Demi Moore) outnumbered art people to such a degree that some artists attending felt dissed. As one put it, ‘It’s like we’re the bottom-feeders here, and this is our turf.’” [ Artforum ] The director of the Penn Museum is quite excited that the Penn Museum is cited often in a book called History of the World in 1,000 Objects. 212 times, actually. And this leads the director of the Penn Museum to say that “20 percent of the world’s history” resides inside his museum. Foot, meet mouth! But really, if that list of 1,000 objects doesn’t include the real treasure of Philly—a Whiz Wit from Pat’s King of Steaks—does it even matter? [ The Art Newspaper ] And now, reviews!

Here’s Martha Schwendener on Chris Martin at Anton Kern (and Half Gallery): “Virtually all of the paintings, even the ones with batik-looking skeins of paint swirling across their surfaces, have a geometric substructure that anchors the composition. Others include sinuous shapes and forms that rise from the bottom of the picture plane, like plants or stalactites.” [ NYT ] And Ken Johnson experiences Marina Abramovic’s “Generator.” He goes into detail about the woozy deafness and woozy blindness. And then: “It’s a work in progress. But whatever you may think of Ms. Abramovic, one thing’s for sure: An artwork by her without her electric personal presence is like coffee without caffeine.” [ NYT ]

Question: What artist's New York studio was called "The Factory"?
Answer: Andy Warhol