He carried a camera with him at all times, capturing everything from personal friends to iconic celebrities. The photographs signified his apathy towards social hierarchy and also ranged from black and white 35 mm portraits to Polaroid shots. He approached photography in two ways. This was a clear demonstration of his interest in repeated imagery. In another instance, he would only choose a single photo from a set to become a print.
Therefore, photography provided Warhol opportunities to showcase both his private self and his public artistic identity. The screenprinting process was a variation of stenciling. Warhol had a streamlined process in producing silk screen prints. First, he laid a photograph on to the mesh of a silk screen. Afterwards, he passed an ink-covered squeegee over the mesh. The ink would pass through the mesh and impress a print of the image onto the canvas underneath. The choice of ink depended on the intended composition of the final product.
Warhol was able to apply multiple colors to create a layering effect, thus a different color composition could be made each time. He used a variety of canvases and papers. Producing art in a systematic manner similar to an assembly line, Warhol gave rise to series or portfolios of his beloved celebrities. Even today, these massively recognizable images serve as a beacon of popular culture.
Similar to his other works, his sculptures replicated commercial symbols and ideologies. His best known sculpture from this series is probably his Brillo Boxes, As the name suggests, Warhol applied silkscreened logos of the consumer product onto plywood boxes. The resulting appearance was identical to the logoed boxes often see in supermarkets. These sculptures were first exhibited at the Stable Gallery in and called to question what can be considered as fine art.
All rights reserved. Privacy Policy. After studying pictorial design and painting at the Carnegie Institute of Technology now Carnegie Mellon University , he moved to New York City, where he supported himself by producing images for advertising and fashion magazines. He continued to make art, which he exhibited in various small galleries and other venues in New York, yet Warhol viewed his commissioned work as distinct from his artwork, which, at that time, often reflected the legacy of both Abstract Expressionist artists and the influence of more recent figures, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Warhol found source material for his art from such things as advertisements, comics, and stories from magazines and newspapers. Active brushstrokes combined with drips and splatters functioned as signs not only of the gestural impulse, but also, in a nod to artists of the previous generation, a kind of reference to creativity and originality made visible; yet paradoxically, it was by embracing not only the imagery of mass culture but also its aesthetic and means of production that he developed the qualities that made his art so distinctive and influential.
Around , Warhol adopted a more graphic and detached style comprising bold and often contrasting colors, crisp outlines, and commercial imagery.
Screenprinting was well suited for his art as it enabled him to repeat images derived from photographic sources multiple times—even within the same painting or print—in a variety of media and colors. It also allowed him to highlight both the detached quality of the process and the imperfections such uneven tone, smudges, gaps, and signs of irregular printing often found in commercial production. Rather than using a contemporary image, however, he chose a publicity photograph for the film Niagara , which he then cropped to bring her features into greater focus.
While Gold Marilyn Monroe has an almost elegiac feel due to the isolation of the small screenprinted image of the actress against a flat gold background, Marilyn is shockingly bold, with a palette of bright yellow, acid green, and hot pink, whose graphic power is all the more pronounced because of the small size—6" x 6"—of the work and the lack of margins. The Fauves used non-representational color and representational form to convey different sensations.
Apply the same idea to the portrait of Marilyn Monroe below, using the controls to adjust the colors. How does the color affect the mood? They refer to the popular culture, which also inspires Warhol to experiment with the technique of silkscreen printing, a popular technique used for mass production. In doing so, Warhol moves away from the elitist avant-garde tradition. The repetition of her image symbolized mass production, while the diptych style used in the portrait was inspired by the Byzantine icons of Christian saints.
Although deeply fascinated by their professional lives, Warhol was also just as interested in the struggles and suffering these women endured behind their painted-on smiles. Case in point, Warhol painted Marilyn just two weeks after she had committed suicide. In his other piece, Liz Taylor was created when she was gravely ill Perhaps he wanted to depict that these famous women were regular human beings who experienced pain and suffering, despite their celebrity.
It was both worship and analysis that criticized and encouraged a culture that had become obsessed with money and fame. At the same time, Warhol also used Marilyn to criticize himself, as he was also after the same fame and celebrity that his famous subjects enjoyed. Although he was careful to conceal his faith throughout his career, it is believed that the Marilyn Monroe diptych was also explicitly religious: Marilyn Monroe appears in the canvas as a superhuman and is almost saintly-like. Therefore, Marylin was used to represent a martyr that has to this day remained unchanged and immaculate even as the rest of contemporary society continues to rot and waste away.
Warhol produced 13 almost identical portraits of Marilyn Monroe, each with a different colored background for his first one-person exhibition. When the audience and the public needed to see the modern world they had created through new eyes, Warhol was always ready to engage in honest representation and assessment. If he was here today, who knows who he would have opted to focus on?
With socialites ruling the day today, the likes of Kim Kardashian would have made great subjects for Warhol.
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