Silk-screening his little elfin heart out, framing for posterity some classic American cultural icon--Marilyn, Jackie O or Elvis-- in a signature style every bit as distinctive as the figures he was idolizing, stands ANDY WARHOL, the counterculture's answer to Ed Sullivan. Or maybe P.T. Barnum. Like the Beatles, Warhol was a pure product of the 1960s (the dynamic simply would not have evolved in any other context), and inasmuch as the Beatles articulated what the swinging 60s was supposed to sound like, Warhol showed people what that era was supposed to look like.
Before I actually learned anything about the guy, I had always assumed he was from New York, a logical assumption given how closely Warhol was identified with that town, but the truth is he was from Pittsburgh. Not my first guess, either. He was born Andrew Warhola, Jr. on August 6, 1928. For reasons not entirely clear, he would later drop the "a" from his last name. By most accounts, Warhol was raised in a perfectly "normal" working-class household; look for clues to inform the lifestyle he would later adopt as impresario of the avant-garde Factory and you will not find them. He was, however, something of a "sickly" child, spent a lot of time in bed under the care of his mother, and it was during those periods of relative inactivity that Warhol would take an interest in drawing. Hardly some primitive savant, Warhol studied the fine points of graphic design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. In 1949 he moved to New York City, and quickly made a name for himself in the field of commercial art. Though well-paying corporate gigs were a great way to earn a living, they hardly satisfied Warhol's personal ambitions, so as the 1950s wound down, he began the transition to the "serious" world of fine art.
It's fair to say Andy Warhol put his name on the map with his 32 Campbell Soup Cans series. Produced in 1962, the piece simultaneously marked Warhol's debut as a fine artist and the West Coast debut of "pop" art in Los Angeles. Priced at $100 a canvas at the time of their premiere, today the series is valued at many, many millions of dollars, and that's not counting the myriad of variations on the soup can theme Warhol would produce over time.
During this period, the loose aggregation of "artsy" types, speed freaks, drag-queens, socialites, musicians, free-thinkers, hustlers, wannabes and various other assorted groupies and hangers-on that collectively made up The Factory grew out of a lot of partying, hanging out, and experimenting. Warhol took inspiration from this motley crew that tended to overpopulate his studio and occupy much of his free time to crank out a wide range of artworks in assembly line fashion, hence the studio's famous namesake. It was also around this time that Warhol began to cultivate his reputation as both a self-made celebrity and celebrity-pimp, mentoring the small stable of young, attractive, and dynamic personalities whom he dubbed Superstars, many of whom became well-known, marketable public figures in their own right--Nico, Joe Dellesandro, Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ultra Violet, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling.
I'd like to turn the whole world on for just a moment.
Edie Sedgwick
When painting and silkscreen production began to bore him, Warhol turned his attention to independent film production. He didn't bother taking the time to study any of the technical aspects of the medium, and though the films were generally interesting, they were also exceptionally amateurish, but of course that was the whole point. Warhol never fancied himself the 60s reincarnation of Erich von Stroheim. He was just experimenting, and he was blessed with a roving eye for talent and for whatever looked good. As the Factory was a natural meeting place for artists of all stripes, it also attracted its share of musical luminaries, including Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. Reed's groundbreaking new band The Velvet Underground was more or less the Factory's house band, so it only made sense that Warhol would produce their debut record, in which Nico was featured prominently as a backup vocalist. Warhol knew as much about the business of music production as he knew about producing films, but what of it? An original Warhol motif adorned the cover of the Underground's first LP, and one could argue that mainstream American punk-rock, for all intents and purposes, was invented with this record.
Naturally, the sense of utopia that the Factory crowd epitomized was inevitably doomed to failure much like that of the decade itself. A delusional, self-styled feminist and would-be playwright named Valerie Solanis walked into the Factory as it existed on June 3, 1968, and critically shot Warhol at point-blank range. His recovery was nothing short of miraculous (close friends would assert he suffered physical ill-effects for the rest of his life), but the event had a profound effect on Warhol's life and his art. In its heyday, The Factory studios essentially enjoyed an open-door policy. Warhol had been surprisingly accessible for a big-name commodity, and it wasn't all that difficult at one time to have an audience with him when he felt like seeing somebody, or simply had nothing better to do at the moment, but that relaxed atmosphere came to an abrupt halt after the Solanis assassination attempt. The freaks and the crazies would have to find some other outlet for their creative energies.
And so, for the most part, would Warhol. He made no secret of the fact that he fed off the creative inspiration of his entourage every bit as much as they fed off the 24-hour party people vibe that was the Factory itself. Warhol cultivated a much more conservative (so to speak), quieter life in the years since the sixties. He continued to produce interesting objets d'art to be sure, but his creative focus was noticeably more business-oriented than it had ever appeared to be in the past; as the seventies gave way to the eighties, Warhol had long since morphed into a big-time entrepreneur. He continued to mentor prolific young talent--Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, to name a few--but something was missing. The Pied Piper quality that Warhol personified in the sixties was no longer in evidence. The whirlwind sense of making stoned merriment while neatly encapsulating what was in the air and quite obvious to everybody that was equally Turned On and Tuned In had pretty much run its course. The problem for Warhol was that for every Candy Darling or Edie Sedgwick, there also had to be a Valerie Solanis. And confronted with such an alternative, Warhol did what anybody else probably would have done: the party, such as it was, was over.
In the various interviews Warhol would submit to over the years, he liked to confound the banality of the interviewers' questions with equally banal and often stupefying responses. His artwork and his whole sense of style in general could have the equal effect on his detractors, of which there were many. Without a doubt, Warhol was a somewhat polarizing figure in the art world; naysayers would argue his technique was fundamentally lacking, and that he clearly valued commercial success at the expense of artistic integrity. Personally, I think the people who badmouthed Warhol's work were just threatened by how accessible it was, like it was too easy. He was certainly nothing if not prolific; in today's parlance, we would probably describe him as a workaholic, but Tom Wolfe neatly articulated the legacy of the man. Prior to the pop artist, and particularly Andy Warhol, the reigning attitude in the world of art was that of the abstract expressionist, and the idea was that America was a benighted, crassly commercialized, rather horrible place and the artist could only turn his back as best he could and avert his eyes from this side of the modern world. Warhol came along as part of a slightly younger generation, and his idea was, "Oh, it's so horrible, I love it!"
Andy Warhol died in his sleep of cardiac arrhythmia at 6:32 AM in New York City on February 22, 1987, following routine gall bladder surgery.
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