Tate Introductions: Warhol

By Stephanie Straine

A central figure in pop art, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was one of the most significant and influential artists of the later twentieth century. In the 1960s he began to explore the growing interplay between mass culture and the visual arts, and his constant experimentation with new processes for the dissemination of art played a pivotal role in redefining access to culture and art as we know it today. • At the height of his fame, Warhol claimed he was "abandoning" painting, shifting his practice towards a commitment to the theoretically limitless channels ofpublishing, film, fashion, music, and broadcasting. It was this "transmission" of art and radical ideas that embodied his ethical conviction that "art should be for everyone". • Stephanie Straine is Assistant Curator at Tate Liverpool, and specialises in American art of the 1960s. Her lively yet authoritative text provides the perfect introduction to the life and work of a pioneering artist whose legacy extends into the digital age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tate Publishing
• Release date: Nov 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781849763295

Book preview

Andy Warhol

Stephanie Straine

Tate Introductions

Tate Publishing

Contents

Title Page

‘I can draw anything’: from Pittsburgh to Madison Avenue

The blotted line

Leaving the commercial world behind

Turning pop

Painting and performance

Discovering the silkscreen

America’s trauma

Abandoning painting

The shooting

Success and shadows: Warhol’s 1970s

Notes

Index

Copyright

Also available in this series

Andy Warhol, 1950s. Photograph by Melton-Pippin (with pencil adjustments to face).

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

‘I can draw anything’: from Pittsburgh to Madison Avenue

Andy Warhol worked hard to erase Andrew Warhola. In the iconic images of the pop artist wearing a silver wig and leather jacket at the height of his 1960s fame, the shy, pale boy born in Pittsburgh in 1928 is nowhere to be seen. His early childhood did, however, have a major impact on the artist he was to become, particularly his intensely religious upbringing in the Ruthenian Catholic Church (close to the Russian Orthodox tradition), his bouts of ill health and resulting hypochondria, as well as the working-class poverty his family experienced. His parents Andrej and Julia Warhola were immigrants to the United States from Mikova, a small village now on the Slovakian-Ukraine border, then on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Warhol only learnt English when he entered elementary school; a hybrid dialect of Hungarian and Ukrainian known as ‘Po Nasemu’ was spoken at home. Andrej Warhola became aware of his son’s prodigious artistic talent early on, and started saving money to send him to college. Tragically, he would never see his son’s later success: he died suddenly in 1942, just as Andy was beginning high school.

After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Pictorial Design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Warhol moved to New York in June 1949 with the goal of becoming a commercial artist and illustrator. His first job was to illustrate an article in women’s fashion magazine Glamour, appropriately titled ‘Success Is a Job in New York’. As part