Pop Art and Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Warhol was a prominent US painter, film-maker and author, and a leading figure in the Pop Art movement.
Andrew Warhola was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents had emigrated to the USA from Ruthenia, a region now in the Slovak Republic.
Between 1945 and 1949 Warhol studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1949, he moved to New York and changed his name to Warhol. He worked as a commercial artist for magazines and also designed advertising and window displays.
In the early 1960s, he began to experiment with reproductions based on advertisements, newspaper headlines and other mass-produced images from American popular culture such as Campbell's soup tins and Coca Cola bottles. In 1962, he began his series portraits of Marilyn Monroe. He also included other subjects like Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley. The same year he took part in the New Realists exhibition in New York, which was the first important event of Pop Art.
In 1963, Warhol he got into the film industry with some experimental films. His studio, known as the Factory, became a meeting point for young artists, actors and musicians. One of these, Valerie Solanas, shot and seriously wounded him in 1968.
Warhol was now established as an internationally famous artist and throughout the 1970s and 1980s exhibited his work around the world.
On 22 February 1987, Warhol died unexpectedly in a New York hospital following an operation.
The name Pop Art is attributed to the English critic Laurence Alloway, who used the term for the first time in 1958 and was established a few years later in the sixties, a period when Pop Art had its greater influence. Until then Pop Art artists called themselves Neo Dada with reference to the Dada movement. Some people consider Dadaism the herald of Pop Art and certainly had a great influence on it. The two currents are connected with each other in their effort to raise the common, daily subject to objects of art.
Early in the sixties, Pop Art started developing especially in the United States. The personality of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichnestein gave a large boost to Pop Art. Although England was the birthplace of Pop Art, it had great success across the Atlantic, due to the robust American economy.
Main characteristics of Popp Art were spontaneity, creative exaggeration, light disposition, satire, bright colours, and generally the rejection of the traditional. Pop Art served the so called mass culture, connected to a kind of commercial art and the wide public. In contrast to earlier Modern Art currents, Pop Art showed an indifference to difficult, incomprehensible and more cerebral subjects, which Pop Art artists consider elitist products. Characteristic samples of Pop Art aesthetics, are depictions of tin cans of a specific beverage, Elvis Presley and Merilyn Monroe, or other subjects drawn from comics and advertisements.
Some of the Pop Art artists are Andy Warhol, Roy Lichnestein, Peter Blake Richard Hamilton and others.
