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Andy Warhol's early life

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interest in celebrities began at a young age

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collected signed portraits of Hollywood stars

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Mae West

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Shirley Temple

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was born in 1928 and grew up in Pittsburgh where he is now buried (died in 1987)

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made his name as an artist in the early 1960s

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paintings of everyday household objects: Coca Cola bottles, Campbell Soup cans

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probably most well-known for the paintings he produced throughout the 1960s of celebrities including Marylin Monroe, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Kennedy

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the celebrity paintings

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used already existing images

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used images repeatedly, e.g. Marilyn Monroe's picture from the 1953 film "Niagara"

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the process of appropriation is one of the main ways Warhol is connected to the movement called "Pop Art"

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Roy Lichtenstein took images from comic books and blew them up to scale

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James Rosenquist would combine images of cares, airplanes, spaghetti, lipstick, etc. all taken from advertising

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unlike abstract expressionist movement of 1950s (e.g. Pollock)

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pop art was concerned with the distinction between popular culture and high art, putting familiar objects into gallery spaces

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challenged the idea of artist as creative visionary

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pop art raised the question: are pop artists really just thieves?

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Warhol's career

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repetition was a key factor

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he said, "he wanted to be a machine, everyone should want to be a machine"

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a double Elvis, Marilyn 50 times

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attention is being drawn to the ubiquity of machine mediated images

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with Marilyn repeated 50 times on the canvas, we stop seeing the celebrity and instead notice the silk-screening errors, the smears of paint out of alignment, the minor ways the very same image can be inflected sa versions

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prolific

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1963-1968

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large number of silkscreens

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hundreds of movies

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472 screen tests, short silent films of people who passed through the doors of his studio

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shot at 24 frames per second but projected at 16 frames per second, so slowing them down

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screen tests weren't auditions for roles in larger movies,

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he was attempting to create his own system of stars and celebrities by using the same people over and over again in his films

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end of sixties

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visual identity: platinum wig, sunglasses, and a persona

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notoriously difficult interviewee

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"uh, yes"

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"uh, no"

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"gee, I don't know, what do you think?"

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70s and 80s

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socialized with major stars

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regular at nightclub Studio 54

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produced portraits of the celebrities around him, worked from photographs that he took