After an adolescence in Pittsburgh, a degree in pictorial design from the Carnegie Institute, Andy Warhol took off in New York where he began as an advertising illustrator. This journey may perhaps be seen as the etiology of the disassociated relationship to art of an artist who would live as a brand himself, constructing a public persona between narcissistic self-celebration and underground icon. Andy Warhol liked to define himself as a «commercial artist». Provocation?
An unprecedented artistic practice
DIn his studio, the Factory, where he employs assistants, he will be among the first to care about productivity, incorporating both consumerist and productive codes into the realization of the works and their silkscreens.« Being good at business is the most fascinating form of art »The artist finds an unprecedented place among celebrities, those he encountered while working as an illustrator for the fashion magazines Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. The series of portraits of stars – and self-portraits – will remain emblematic within a prolific and diverse oeuvre, playing the role of all the ambiguity of Pop Art.
Towards a post-modern aesthetic?
The new realism of the 1960s, taking up the inspirations and codes of Pop Art, will renew the aesthetic language in the sense of a more frontal approach to consumer society, taking a more radical stance than American Pop Art, which remains ambivalent in its critical pretensions.
