Andy Warhol Essay, Research Paper
Andy Warhol
by Brandon Noll
Andy Warhol was thought to be born around 1929 to 1930 near
Pittsburgh to Czech immigrant parents. His real name was Andrew
Warhola. He was an American painter and filmmaker who was a
leader during the pop art movement. Other artists during his time
were Rosquest and Lichtenstein. The greatest influences on his work
were his mother and comic books. By some art experts he is
considered to being one of the most controversial artists of all time.
He is considered that because his art broke the impressionist tradition.
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and got an education at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology, and soon after he practiced
commercial art in New York City which was an experience that he
used later in his career. He won the Art Director’s Club Medal in
1957 for his illustrations for advertisements. He attracted a lot of
attention in the 1960’s with exhibitions of pop art objects from daily
life, such as “Cambell’s Soup Can” in 1965 and “Green Coca-Cola
Bottles in 1962, and of entertainers like Marilyn Monroe. These
images were silk screened, which is a mechanical process that allowed
them to be endlessly repeated. He would also paint everyday
occurrences such as car crashes and black riots. Warhol took a similar
impersonal approach in his experimental underground films, such as
The Chelsea Girls, which was a seven hour, virtually unedited
semidocumentary. Later, more complex films, such as Lonesome
Cowboys and Trash are also marked by improvised dialogue, lack of
plot, and extreme eroticism. Among Warhol’s publications are “The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again” and
America, a collection of his scathing photographs of contemporary life
in the U.S. From 1969 until his death in 1987, he published
‘Interview,’ a monthly magazine with illustrated articles about current
celebrities. In 1994 the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest single-
artist museum in the United States, opened in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.