Andy Warhol - The icon of Pop Art

Andy Warhol is the artist who is celebrated in the recognized “rating agency of the art scene” as No. 1 among contemporary artists. This top position is not only an expression of its comprehensive awareness, but also a mirror of its huge financial success. Who was brought about himself: Warhol was a graphic designer and painting and visual artist, filmmaker and publisher and most important co -founder of POP Art .

His work includes graphics and paintings, photographs and films, music productions, objects and books.

As the youngest son of Russian immigrants, Andy Warhol had born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and also grew up in this area. Due to a serious illness in primary school age, he was bedridden for a long time and developed his interest in art, film and comic during this time. At 17, Warhol began his four -year studies (painting, use graphics and design), after the end he immediately moved to the center of advertising and the art of art at that time, to New York.

There he lived on occasional work at the beginning of the 1950s, but also lived the decisive foundations of his later work: the Russian name Andrew Warhola was shortened, he developed the idea of ​​the motive transmission and for the first time had his works edited.

Already in 1952 he had his first important solo exhibition as a graphic artist in New York , in 1956 he was able to exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art. At the end of the 1950s, Warhol was already one of the best known (and most expensive) graphic designers in Manhattan, now he also wanted to make a name for himself as an artist.

He wanted canvas pictures in a completely new way, unlike the current abstract expressionists (Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko) or the artists of the action painting like Jackson Pollock .

So he chose his motifs from the pop world and from Hollywood , and comics and cartoons were also processed. However, he soon had to find that this motif world was not a new discovery, artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein had already used it here.

So Warhol resorted to pictures from his area, from advertising, magazines and magazines. From these motifs that were familiar to each of his fellow human beings, he had screen printing templates manufactured and created the well -known works with the numerous serial repetitions.

With an everyday motif, Warhol also reopened in 1962 at his first solo exhibition as an artist, the presentation of Campell's Soup Cans . This was followed by the world -famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, which Warhol processed in several color variations, in the same way, many works were created with Elvis, Liz Taylor and James Dean as a motif.

In all of these pictures, Warhol deliberately used templates that he processed, he saw himself less as an art producer than as a reproduced works of art. Warhol's artistic work was the design of the motives found according to a certain concept, based on his phenomenal sense of effects that he had acquired as an advertising graphic artist.

In the period that followed, Warhol was increasingly provided with templates from popular culture, even with repulsive motifs such as photos of car accidents and suicide.

Art criticism could not escape the aesthetic charm of the pictures, which, even due to the serial repetitions, did not put the motif, but the design in the foreground. In these works you could see an answer to the manipulations with which the modern mass media increasingly sought to influence the viewer.

The shrill coloring and the deliberately careless mission of the colors also created an unknown attractive look that reminded of a film strip and fascinated the contemporaries. It only lasted until 1965 until Warhol's pictures were celebrated as a sensations on the entire art market.

Andy Warhol had done it, the screen printing work was increasingly manufactured by assistants. Warhol subsequently devoted himself to numerous art projects and was an enthusiastic visitor to the New York VIP party scene. Critics accuse him of producing always uninhibited commerce until his death in 1987, while the Aficionados saw every activity of the "Sphinx without secret" (Warhol characterization of the writer Truman Capote) as art.

In the following video you can see a 50-minute documentary (in English) about Andy Warhol with a large selection of his works:

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