Until the middle of the last century it was unthinkable to admire tin cans in a gallery, so the exhibition of the innovative work Cans of Campbell Soup of Pop Art artist Andy Warhol represented a historical event in the art world.
Cans of Campbell Soup
In 1962, Andy Warhol created the Campbell's Soup Cans series and presented it in his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in New York. A total of thirty-two hand-painted soup cans with different labels on canvas were given a place in the spotlight as works of art. Which is not surprising today, but in 1962 Pop Art was still in its infancy.
The plant as we know it today looked a little different fifty-nine years ago. For its first public display on July 9, 1962, the thirty-two images were arranged in a horizontal line. One after another, just as it would be on the supermarket shelf. Pop art was unstoppable. Warhol introduced consumer goods into the world of galleries without overlooking or artistically veiling their real market value.
His works corresponded to the definition of Pop Art described in a letter from the British artist Richard Hamilton in 1957: «Pop Art is: popular, fleeting, superfluous, low cost, mass produced, young, fun, sexy, full of tricks, glamorous and big business.
Andy Warhol appropriately created his works in a factory, his studio, which he called "The Factory." And he was a machine. For Campbell's Soup Cans, he used a production technique from the advertising industry, screen printing. An industrial motif is reproduced and repeated in successive motifs. As a perfectionist, every detail counted for Andy Warhol, he left nothing to chance.
When viewed from a distance, Campbell's soup cans look like thirty-two identical cans. In fact, all thirty-two are handwritten and unique. Andy Warhol gave tomato soup a different flavor, from beef to black bean and onion soup.
Five years after painting Campbell's soup cans, Warhol went one step further and gave them color: blue, green, yellow, purple. The letters and the basic colors of the cans became a new harmonious series. With these nineteen paintings Warhol captured his artistic mark, renewed the processes of art and introduced the star of Pop Art: the polychrome series. Warhol hand-painted the Campbell's Soup Cans series. He used serigraphy, but also color. He played with the rules of art in order to exploit them better, but also to see things better.
Warhol once said: "All things have their beauty, but not everyone knows how to recognize them." Andy Warhol was kind of a poet about himself. A can can become a vase of flowers, a brand logo can be carefully and delicately painted with a brush. And a can of soup from mass industry can become an artistic icon: the icon of pop art.
Campbell's Soup: A Royal Brand
Warhol claimed that he was a regular consumer of Campbell's Soup: one for lunch every day for twenty years. The repetition did not deter him, "the same thing over and over again" was what he was looking for. Consumption was and is the heart of American society, but the industrial goods of the masses were still denied access to museums at the time. And that is exactly what Warhol wanted: to introduce real mass consumption into art.
To reflect the world around him, he used photos from advertising, celebrities, and comics. The current Campbell's Soup brand slogan also applies to pop art: "Made for real life." In an interview with The Face magazine, Andy Warhol once said that his mother used tin cans as vases for bouquets. So it seems reasonable to think that his series of works with cans also pay homage to this childhood memory of his.
Andrew Warhola was the youngest son of parents who immigrated to the United States from northeastern Slovakia. Creative from an early age, his parents supported him as best they could despite lack of financial means. A can can be the epitome of an everyday disposable item for one person and a vase for another.
Pop-art
Pop art (Pop art) is a popular and affordable art. It is understandable to most people, easy to recognize and explain. It is an art direction based on objects of mass culture and oriented to entertainment, to commerce and not to the search for a deep meaning, a philosophy and a spirituality.
This is one of the most important art movements of the 1950th century. Pop art originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the XNUMXs. Pop art was born as a reaction to a completely different direction of modern art - abstract expressionism.
To understand what pop art is, you need to start from a different direction in art - abstract expressionism. In it, the artist frees the mind from the laws of logic and expresses his inner world on the canvas, as he «sees» and «feels». But in reality it is even more complicated. The same problem arose in the 50s of the XNUMXth century, despite the immense popularity, not everyone understood the work of abstract expressionist artists. To appreciate them at their true value, a person must already be versed in the art.
What made this art direction accessible not to everyone, but to the elite. Pop art has become a kind of reaction, opposition to abstract expressionism. His motto was the idea: a return to reality, not to an artist's fantasy. The source of inspiration was advertising, magazines, food packaging, photography, television, idols, stereotypes, movies, supermarkets, comics, in general, everything that happens in the daily life of the most ordinary people.
The first steps of a new style in painting were associated with the activities of the Independent Group of artists and architects, founded in 1952 in London. They were the first to use modern technologies to create paintings with main motifs from popular urban and mass culture. American culture became the basis of the study.
The pioneers of the style E. Paolozzi and R. Hamilton studied the psychological influences of mass culture, its meaning, linguistic content. First of all, I was interested in the methods of industrial advertising, modern technologies for the production of advertising, the technique of creating collages.
In 1956 the exhibition «This is tomorrow» took place. The painters presented to the public the images in the style of pop art, depicting Hollywood stars, frames from famous films with magnification. It was after the exhibition that many art school graduates joined the stream, who were inspired by the new style.
In the United States, the style developed and became popular. Here, much attention was paid to the aestheticization of the banal: packaging, consumer goods. The essence of American pop art: the objects that people consume make representatives of different social classes equal to each other. Thus, pop art is the art of social equality.
In England, the Pop Art art movement originated from an English art critic, Lawrence Alloway, who was the first to use the term "mass popular art" in the late 1950s. They were members of the group The Independent Group: Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Alison and Peter Smithson and Lawrence Alloway. However, the first work should be in 1956, by Richard Hamilton.
In the United States, on the other hand, this current arose from individual people who worked alone and were not represented as members of any group. The most famous artists are Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. What is strange is the fact that the era developed independently of each other in the United States and England.
The play
These are the Campbell's soup cans that Andy Warhol created for his first exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. With this work, the author addresses the phenomenon of interchangeability, because "the individuality of the individual with the consumer society of the 1960s in America is fading."
The picture consists of thirty-two canvases. The printing technique was used in the creation. Interestingly, the Campbell Soup Company (CBS) is still around today (founded in 1869) and the illustrations show what types of soups the company was selling at the time. The cans differ not only in the name of the individual soups, but also in the part of the red label, where the color other than the red hue is present. The entire composition consists of thirty-two rectangles, that is, the labels are the main object of the container.
It can be said that all the cans look the same and create a sense of unification, the reason for this is that the cans have the same structure and can be represented by monotonous spaces like on a supermarket shelf. The cans are divided into two parts. In the red part two words are written, the name of the company and the word 'condensed'.
On the other hand, in the white part you can see the respective types of soups, which are written in red. The word 'soup' is particularly decorated with a darker stripe in the middle of the letters and the bottom of the box is also decorated with the gold trim and the red line. In the image there is a strong contrast of red and white. Here there is simply no transition from bright red to red. In the can, the color red plays a much more important role than the color white.
If the can was only painted white, it would not be interesting and it would not be eye-catching. Maybe then it wouldn't belong to Pop Art. There are also two color harmonies here, one consists of red and gold tone (the symbol in the middle), and the second consists of white, gold and black tone. The image is also drawn in the so-called comic style and has no movement. Thus, the entire image has an almost realistic image shape (due to the comic style) and image space.
The red color means that it has a warm, energetic and playful effect on the viewer. In contrast, we do not count black and white as colors because they do not affect us and are neutral. Even gold has a warm character and although a can contains white clay (the transparent half of the container), we tend to classify in the warm color environment.
Today it is not clear exactly why Warhol chose Campbell's soup cans, but it can be said that he chose cans for a number of reasons. One could be that Warhol needed a new subject after leaving the comic strip. Another reason arose from Roberta Latow's recommendation. She said that in addition to the pictures of US bills, Andy should draw something simple. It is also known that Warhol liked soups and that he drew the bowl because it was close to his heart. The choice shows his familiarity with these soups.
And why does Campbell's Soup Cans belong to the era of Pop Art? We have to start from the definition, that is, Pop Art is an artistic movement in painting that began in the mid-fifties of the XNUMXth century, was created in England and the United States, whose motifs are taken from everyday culture, the world of consumption and advertising, this work corresponds to this current because it shows the American consumer society of that time.
The first series of cans was made in 1962. In 1969, Andy developed another series of ten images (there were a total of 250 copies of the second series), but they looked a bit different. The main idea was kept, red and white, but also in the yellow in the middle of the picture and the contrasts become even stronger, for example through the contour between yellow and black or through people. The second series argues strongly with the irregularities and unevenness of the first series. These cans already showed his development in the field of advertising.
First exposition
Campbell's Soup Cans was Andy Warhol's first significant solo exhibition, dramatically changing his career. It happened in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, California. Warhol was then working as an illustrator for fashion magazines. He had several New York gallery shows and once even wrote Life magazine about him, but overall Warhol remained a little-known artist.
Once he even tried to donate one of his works to the American museum The MoMA, but they returned it. Ferrus Gallery director Irwin Blum offered the show to the little-known Warhol after he first saw six canvases in 1961.
Blum came to Warhol at the suggestion of Ivan Karp, deputy director of New York's famed Leo Castelli gallery and one of the earliest and most devoted supporters of Pop art, hoping to see Warhol paintings such as the Castelli gallery's Roy Lichtenstein comics. But after visiting Warhol's apartment on Lexington Avenue, which was also used as a studio, it was decided to present an exhibition entitled "Soup Cans 32" consisting of thirty-two 182 by 132 cm paintings depicting soup cans. Campbell.
“…I walked down the hall,” Blum said later, “and I saw on the floor, leaning against the wall, pictures of soup cans. I said, "Andy, what is this?" He said, "Oh, I'm doing it now." And I said, "Why more than one?" He said, "I'm going to do thirty-two." He just couldn't believe it. I said, "Why thirty-two?" He said, "There are thirty-two varieties in all."
New York was considered the center of exhibition life in those years, but Warhol found it interesting to hold an exhibition in Los Angeles, since Hollywood movie stars, who have always been a subject of special interest to the artist, may know of the.
Warhol's transformation of an object into a commodity was exactly the opposite of the transformation of actual commodities into objects in Duchamp's readymade. The paintings were arranged along the white walls of the gallery on shelves arranged like in a real supermarket. The exhibition was undoubtedly radical, many even questioned whether this could be considered art.
The show did not cause the stir that Blum and Warhol expected. In fact, what little response was received from the public or from art historians was quite harsh. "This young 'artist' is either a fool or a stubborn charlatan," one reviewer wrote.
A cartoon in the Los Angeles Times mocks the paintings and their intended audience. "Frankly, cream of asparagus doesn't work for me," says one art lover to another, standing in a gallery. "But the awful richness of the chicken noodles gives me a genuine sense of Zen." An art dealer next to the Ferus Gallery was even sharper. He left real cans of Campbell's Soup on her window, along with the inscription: “Don't be fooled. Get the original. Our lowest price is two for thirty-three cents."
Despite all this, Blum managed to sell five paintings, mostly to friends, including actor Dennis Hopper. But even before he finished the show, he suddenly had a change of heart. Realizing that the paintings were more suitable in a complete set, Blum bought the ones he sold. He agreed to pay Warhol $1,000 for everything. Warhol was delighted, he always thought of Campbell's Soup Cans as a set. For both the artist and the dealer, this decision was a complicated act that paid off in the future.
Once audiences and critics got over the shock, they began to mature into Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. First, it was a new idea in art. How difficult is it to understand a painting if the original is probably on the kitchen shelf? Critics began to notice the sly and wry humor in Warhol's "portraits" of Scotch Broth and Chicken Gumbo. And Blum's decision to keep the paintings together increased his influence.
The exhibition at the Ferus Gallery marked a turning point in Warhol's career. After Campbell's Soup Cans, Warhol moved from drawing to screen printing, a process that produced more results and allowed him to create multiple versions of the same work. His reputation continued to grow. By 1964, the sale price of a soup can painting missing from Blum's set had risen to $1.500, and New York socialites were using soup cans to print on custom-made dresses by the artist. Warhol himself.
Campbell's Soups itself soon joined in the fun. In the late 1960s, the company capitalized on the then-popular whimsy of dresses with a Souper dress and a small purse covered in Warhol-esque soup labels. Each dress had three gold stripes at the bottom, so the wearer could cut the dress to the perfect length without cutting the pattern off the tin. Price: one dollar and two Campbell's Soup labels.
Today, Warhol soup cans remain a pop culture icon, from plates and mugs to neckties, T-shirts, surfboards and skateboards. One of the most shocking photographs was that of Warhol himself: on the cover of Esquire magazine in May 1969, he was drowning in a can of Campbell's tomato soup.
In the end, Warhol's cans were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as worthy of being called art. In 1996, the museum bought Irving Blum's thirty-two paintings for $1962 million, an astonishing return on his $1995 investment in XNUMX. Even the Souper dress has been declared a classic. In XNUMX, a year before the paintings arrived at the Museum of Modern Art, they entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Campbell's Soup Cans exhibition became a significant milestone in the development of pop art and the career of Andy Warhol, who would continue to work in this genre, moving on to producing production screen prints featuring portraits of movie stars and newspaper clippings. , and then will open its famous Factory in Manhattan.
Blum will specialize in pop art and will work with other notable pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella. Pop art, characterized by simplicity, accessibility and laconic images, replicated by objects of mass culture and consumerism, will become one of the symbols of American art.
The artist
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American artist, one of the main exponents of pop art in that country. At The Factory that he founded, his employees and friends were busy helping him with the production of his art. The success of Andy Warhol, who from the early 1960s dealt with media images of superstars, led collectors and the nobility of money to let themselves be interpreted by him.
He also made experimental films, founded Interview magazine, and was a music producer for the rock band Velvet Underground. When Andy Warhol died at the age of fifty-eight, he left behind an extensive body of work, ranging from simple advertising graphics to paintings, objects, movies, and books.
From commercial artist to gallery artist
Trained as a commercial and highly successful artist in the 1950s, he switched to fine art in 1960, initially dealing with emblems of the media and consumer society. He developed and created ads for Vogue, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar and LIFE. He illustrated short stories for Truman Capote. Already in 1952/53 he exhibited these early works in his first gallery exhibition and in 1956 in his participation in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. Warhol began collecting art during a trip to Europe and Asia in 1956.
In 1960 Andy Warhol turned to painting and worked on paintings such as Saturday's Popeye and Superman. However, he discovered that Roy Lichtenstein already dominated the gallery market with these motifs. The following year, Andy Warhol returned to the consumer world and chose a Del Monte can with peach halves as his first motif. Starting in December 1961 he worked on the famous series Campbell's Soup Cans, a thirty-two repetition of the frontal representation of a soup can with different flavors, as the label suggests.
Warhol cited consumer goods advertising, which he had previously helped shape with his promising images. With the help of a projector, he was able to enlarge the advertising themes and reproduce them freehand; works produced in series were made with templates. At the same time he made sculptures out of cardboard and wood. Along with Roy Lichtenstein, he reacted to the foreseeable end of Abstract Expressionism, which began with the tragic death of Jackson Pollock in 1956.
After Andy Warhol became successful as a painter and pop art gallery artist, he hid his advertising art from the 1940s and 1950s in a very neurotic way. As he freely admits on POPism, the man in his mid-thirties consciously tried to create a new identity for a new career. Warhol considered the art gallery market to be simply more elegant than that of commercial artists. To do this, he mixed "commercial art" (advertising graphics) with "real art" and vice versa.
Early exhibitions in Los Angeles (1962), Paris with Ileana Sonnabend (1964), and in 1965 his first museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia established Warhol's fame as a painter. In the same year 1965 he stopped painting and devoted himself entirely to screen printing, photography and film media.
Andy Warhol had a runaway success in the early 1960s when he tapped into the media images of movie stars and pop icons like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Liz Taylor. With the idea that ten photographs of these personalities would be more than one, Warhol reproduced the photographs with the help of screen printing.
Pop colors accentuate, distort and alienate portraits at the same time. Warhol managed to transfer the cult of stars around movie actors, politicians' wives and rock musicians to himself through the unmistakable stylization of his portraits. This allowed her not only to cross social boundaries as an artist, but also to become a pop star.
He found the dark side of the American dream in images of car accidents ("Death and Disaster Series") and the electric chair ("Electric Chair"). Using screen printing, which was considered to be reproductive and therefore unartistic, and using acrylic paint, Andy Warhol created compositions for which he used press photos of tragic accidents or plane crashes and the like as templates.
He painted the canvases before serigraphing them from photographs. The additional paint highlights individual parts of the rendering. Andy Warhol was also interested in reproducing and modifying prints, which employees could produce without his involvement.
Andy Warhol Motivation
Both Ukraine and Slovakia have claimed the right to call Warhol their own for many years: the artist's parents, Ondrej and Julia Justin Warhol, emigrated abroad from the village of Mikova in the Presov region of present-day Slovakia (until 1918 – Austria). -Hungary). By nationality, they were Rusyns, an ethnic minority, which in modern Ukraine is considered part of the titular nation.
However, these disputes are, of course, baseless: Warhol was an exemplar, one hundred percent American, and it is the United States that should legitimately be considered his homeland. Except for his religiosity, carefully hidden during his life, the artist remained faithful to his roots: from childhood he was in the bosom of the Greek-Catholic Church of the Byzantine rite.
As few knew, he zealously attended Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer Cathedral in Manhattan (according to the abbot's memoirs, he first noticed a strange parishioner being baptized in the Orthodox style, and only then did he realize who was). According to relatives of the artist, he was especially proud to have financed his nephew's studies at the seminary.
And in Warhol's own works, art critics see not only the material, but also the spiritual component. The noted contemporary art researcher, critic, and theologian James Romain wrote:
“At first glance, Warhol's consumer images appear to be occupied only by the outer world of modern culture, to the complete exclusion of the inner life of faith. But there is also a gnawing longing for something more, a thirst, especially evident in the latest "Self-Portrait" and in the famous Campbell's soup cans.
To see this religious component, we must rediscover the sense of the sacred, using material things as paths towards the divine, towards the penetration of eternity through time and space”.
This view may seem paradoxical and even shocking, but Romain offers compelling evidence. He sees the notorious Campbell's soup cans (one of Warhol's dominant motifs: he created several versions of Warhol's famous 1962 work) as a self-portrait of the artist:
“The shelves, like Warhol's public image, are cold, a metal machine, impenetrable.
But the self-portrait is complemented by its content; It's actually the most important part of the soup can, but it has very little to do with how the can looks. Soup, a warm source of nutrients, is a sensitive substance that will not survive without protective packaging. Likewise, Warhol's faith is hidden under the imagery of the supermarket.
It is worth noting that one of Warhol's last works was closely associated with religious themes: a series of serigraphs based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. However, here the artist rather showed a different perspective on the existence of sacred art in a secular and profane world, complementing da Vinci's composition, replicated in millions of photos and reproductions, with advertising logos of famous trademarks. As noted by Claudia Schmückly, curator of the first exhibition in the series in the United States:
“This seemingly heretical disrespect reflects the inevitable transformation of deeply religious work into a cliché, whose spiritual message has been drowned out by endless repetition. As Warhol's last episode, The Last Supper serves as a powerful reminder of the principles that have permeated all of his artistic endeavors.
It can be noted that the manner of Warhol, the portraitist, who maniacally removed all skin defects and wrinkles from his models, is explained not only by the desire to “beautify” them, but also by the desire for the absolute, for the image. of an ideal person who washed away all sins from himself (not excluding and the immanent firstborn).
In this light, the famous saying about "fifteen minutes of glory for everyone" becomes clearer: glory grants at least the illusion of immortality; for Warhol, this symbolized, according to some researchers, the transformation of an ordinary man on the street into a being approaching divine order.
Warhol, perhaps, associated himself in part with Christ, not in an obviously heretical messianic context for a good Christian, but in the sense in which the famous theologian Richard Niebuhr, in his book Christ and Culture (1951), compared the work mystique of an artist who “transubs culture”, with the sacrament of the Eucharist, when ordinary bread and wine are transformed into the Holy Gifts.
And even the trick known to almost everyone thanks to the Oliver Stone movie with a golden telephone to talk to God presented to Jim Morrison can be seen outside the cynical packaging. On the one hand, the golden telephone serves as a symbol of power and wealth; Not surprisingly, Latin American dictators loved those devices.
On the other hand, the first known telephone made of gold was presented by American Catholics as a gift to Pope Pius XI in 1930 (the device was used by Roman bishops until the end of John XXIII's pontificate in 1963). So Warhol's gift can be explained in different ways (by the way, according to Morrison's biographer Stephen Davis, the telephone only had a golden dial, again a field for interpretation).
However, Warhol himself was not very fond of giving explanations: he left this occupation to critics, art historians, philosophers and the general public, who willingly gossiped about his works and about his extravagant outfits, friends, semi-legendary adventures. As almost all Warhol biographers point out, he really had little interest in sex, drugs, or even money: he craved fame. And he totally got it.
Biography of Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928, the son of Andrej Varhola (1888-1942) and Julia Justyna in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was named Andrew Warhola in Ruthenian Greek, baptized Catholic. The family had Russian roots and came from the village of Miková in the Carpathians, in the northeast of today's Slovakia (at the time: Kingdom of Hungary), living in poor conditions. Andy had two older brothers: Paul and John. Since Andy Warhol's mother refused to learn English for a long time, Andy only learned the language at school.
1932/33 Andy Warhol's father, Andrej, made a living as an assembly worker for a construction company. He was rarely home and everyone missed him. Since the brilliant Andy could hardly be tamed, the family decided to enroll him in school at the age of four. However, since he came back crying the night of the first day of school, he didn't start school until he was six years old.
1934-1936: elementary school With Andrej Warhola's increased income, he was able to get a loan and move his family to Dawson Street in Oakland. Andy started second grade at Holmes Elementary School as his only day at Soho Elementary School counted as a full year.
1936 Eight-year-old Andy Warhol often suffered from seizures at school that prevented him from writing and was ridiculed by his classmates. A doctor disliked Huntington's chorea (popularly known as St. Vitus' dance) and a rare pigmentation disorder, for which he was long thought to be an albino.
Because he was bedridden for a long time, Warhol developed a preference for comics and movies. Furthermore, his close upbringing with his mother dates back to this experience. After his recovery, he spent almost every Saturday morning at the movies. Shirley Temple became his idol and role model.
1937–1940: Andy's art teacher at Holmes Elementary School suggested in 1937 that he take the prestigious free art class held at the Carnegie Museum on Saturday mornings. Andy attended the free classes on Saturdays regularly until 1941. He was divided into the group of younger students. His teachers, especially Joseph Fitzpatrick, exerted on him the first important artistic influences. Andy Warhol skipped fifth grade.
1942 Death of the father after several years of serious illness due to tuberculosis. The loss hit fourteen-year-old Andy Warhol hard; he was hiding under the bed when his father's body was brought from the hospital. As is the Ruthenian tradition, Ondrej Warhola stayed for three days in his house, which could have triggered Warhol's subsequent confrontation with the subject of death. The family's financial situation is getting worse, but his two older brothers are rarely home.
1945 - 1949: Business Graphics (Painterly Design) at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Andy Warhol graduated from the eleventh grade at Schenley High School. The yearbook entry under his name reads: "As genuine as a fingerprint." In the fall he began studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (today: Carnegie Mellon University), Department of Painting and Design.
1945 Andy Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (today: Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, more precisely pictorial design, art history, sociology, and psychology. Andy's interest in the teachings of the Bauhaus was piqued. He gave drawing lessons and worked during semester breaks, as in the following years, at the Joseph Horne department store in Pittsburgh. He met Philip Pearlstein.
1947 In the third year, Andy Warhol won the John L. Porter Award for Progress for the drawings he had done the previous year while he and his brother were selling fruit from a van. In the summer he rented a barn with his fellow students, which they used as a study.
1948 Andy Warhol began his final year at the Carnegie Institute in the fall. He worked as an image editor for the student magazine «Cano». In his contributions he already used the "blurred line", an improvised monotypic technique that would become his hallmark as a commercial artist.
1949 Andy Warhol showed "The broad gave me my face" at the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh annual exhibition. The jury controversially discussed and rejected the image. George Grosz, one of the jury members, praised the work, which was finally shown and recognized in a second local exhibition. On June 16, 1949 Andy Warhol graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Together with fellow student Philip Pearlstein he moved to New York to work as a commercial artist. The two shared an apartment on St. Mark's Place. In September they moved into an old factory on 21st Street. From then on he called himself Andy Warhol. Much of his early designs concerned shoes while working in a shoe factory.
Andy went to the art directors of the major magazines and pitched them a job. Glamor magazine gave him his first commission: he designed illustrators for the article "Success is a job in New York." Many other commissions followed, including for Vogue, Seventeen and Harper's Bazaar.
1950 The magazine «Mademoiselle» published drawings signed by «Andy Warhol». His stage name was established around 1942, when the people around him forgot the "a". The artist later recalled that it was, so to speak, a "natural" process (and not a conscious deviation from the roots of it).
1952 First solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in New York (June 16 – July 3), where he presented his illustrations for Truman Capote's books: “Andy Warhol – Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote”. He had already met the gallery's director, Alexander Iolas, in 1945. He received the "Art Directors Club Medal" for designing various newspaper advertisements.
1954 Warhol received a "Certificate of Excellence" from the American Institute of Graphic Arts for his commercial work. Together with Charles Lisanby, who wrote the lyrics, Warhol produced the book "25 Cats Name [sic] Sam and One Blue Pussy" as a gift. He met up with friends at "Serendipity" to color the sheets. In October, The Loft Gallery organized the exhibitions «a new gallery presents new painters»
1956 Andy Warhol received the Art Directors Club 'Distinctive Merit Award' for advertising shoes for I. Miller.
The Bodley Gallery showed Andy Warhol's Drawing for a Boy-Book. On June 16, graphic artist and friend Charles Lisanby embarked on an extensive world tour of Europe and Asia, during which he began collecting. He returned to New York on August 12. First participation in the “Recent Drawings USA” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but as a graphic artist and not yet as a painter or independent artist.
1957 Warhol was one of America's best-known and highest-paid commercial graphic artists. He received a medal and a special award from the Art Directors Club for newspaper advertising graphics.
He then founded "Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc." In "A Golden Book" he published drawings of "erased lines" on gold paper. Exhibition at the Bodley Gallery «A Show of Golden Pictures by Andy Warhol». "Life Magazine" wrote derisively critical of it. Plastic surgery on the nose.
1960 Through Tina Fredericks, Andy Warhol met Emile de Antonio, who was also friends with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Andy Warhol began working on paintings that featured mass-produced imagery (comics and advertisements) and common consumer goods such as Campbell's Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. He showed them in the window of the Bonwit Teller department store, New York (April). He also met Billy Linich (Billy Name) in 1960; he since then he belonged to the circle of Andy Warhol for many years.
1961 Andy Warhol created his first artistic works, with which the catalog raisonné begins. This first series of works was based on advertising illustrations from magazines. At the Leo Castelli Gallery, Warhol saw the works of Roy Lichtenstein, which, like his own recent images, take up comic book motifs. Warhol invited Ivan Karp, Castelli's assistant, to show him his work. Castelli declined to represent Warhol, referring to Lichtenstein's more recent work. Consequently, Warhol abandoned comic book heroes as motifs for his images.
1961 Warhol began working intensively with the initial Campbell's Soup Cans working group. However, at first he always only painted individual cans, more and more he discovered the visual appeal of rows and combinations. "Campbell's Soup Cans Group of 32" and "Campbell's Soup Cans" series of XNUMX.
1962 First solo exhibition as an artist: Warhol exhibited his Campbell's Soup Cans at the invitation of Irving Blum, then a partner of Walter Hopps, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. He made thirty-two nearly identical images because canned soup was available in thirty-two different flavors. Only the content varies, which is not revealed by the external appearance of the mass product.
At about the same time as Rauschenberg, Warhol discovered the technique of photographic screen printing as a method of producing images in the summer. The first work in this technique is «Baseball», which shows the famous baseball player Roger Maris. Warhol experimented with stamps, dies, and templates. Warhol then painted “129 Die in Jet” based on the June 4, 1962 “New York Mirror” cover image. In addition to other disaster images, Warhol also depicted sober Coca-Cola bottles.
After Marilyn Monroe's death on August 5, Warhol created portraits of the diva based on a scene photo from the movie "Niagara." Andy Warhol increasingly made the icons of his time the subject of his portraits: he created an extensive series on Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor (“Liz as Cleopatra”, 1962 – based on a photo of the actress in the magazine “Life” on April 13, 1962) Elvis Presley, James Dean.
Participation in the exhibition "The New Realists" at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York: this first major pop art exhibition included works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal can be seen alongside works of art of European artists. Warhol was represented with "200 cans of Campbell's Soup".
Eleanor Ward showed a selection of Warhol's works at the Stable Gallery: Portraits of Marilyn and Elvis, "Close Cover Before Striking", Coca-Cola. Philip Johnson acquired the painting "Gold Marilyn" for MoMA from this exhibition. Warhol finally ended his work as a commercial artist, through which he had financed his artistic work up to that point.
1963 Andy Warhol set up his phone-free studio, the so-called "Factory," in a fire station on East 87th Street. Co-workers and friends worked on the "production" of art. Between 1962 and 1967, the factory was considered a hot spot for artists of all kinds. Warhol worked on the "Electric Chairs" and "Race Riots" movies. The "Race Riots" silkscreen was based on a Life magazine photograph of the confrontation between civil rights activists and police officers in Birmingham, Alabama.
1968 Attempted assassination of Andy Warhol: Warhol's suffragette and actress Valerie Solana shot him in the factory, seriously injuring him because he had refused to film a script for his "Society to Cut Off Men (SCUM)" manifesto. The era of factories has come to an end.
1987 Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987 at the New York Hospital – Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, New York, at the age of 58, after gallbladder surgery and complications caused by penicillin intolerance. Andy Warhol was buried in Pittsburgh near his family and some of his friends. On April 1, 1987, a memorial service was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, attended by more than two thousand mourners.
Here are some links of interest: