Andy Warhol
«If you want to know everything about Andy Warhol, all you have to do is look at the surface of my paintings, my films, myself. There I am. There is nothing there."underneath »
Andy Warhol is one of the major figures of American pop art, and beyond being an artist, he was a character who profoundly disturbed the boundaries of artistic creation. Formed initially as an illustrator, Andy Warhol began as a publicist for major fashion magazines, and this glamorous yet commercial universe would permeate all his artistic career in a society in the 60s and 70s in the United States that was in rupture with traditional structures. The subversive, provocative, and worldly character he created would become an icon of the New York underground scene. At that time, the emergence of pop art, a form of representation of the most trivial daily life, marked a break with the then dominant abstract expressionism. With Andy Warhol, art is desacralized. His work is characterized by an assumed ambivalence between the creation of an authentic unique work and that of a commercial object. Andy Warhol’s Factory, a veritable studio for the machining of works of art, moves art into the industrial world and opens the way for the experimentation with new techniques of mass production by duplicating the image between photography and screen printing. «In a mechanized world, the artist becomes a machine: that is what I want to be, a machine.» The work of Andy Warhol contains the paradoxes of postmodernism and bears witness to the peak of consumer society, cultural relativism and the reign of the spectacular. With Warhol, art itself becomes a product of mass consumption, an object of enjoyment that plays on the tension between excitement and frustration, evading the exceptional dimension inherent in desire and its manifestation in sublimation. Warhol claims a businesslike stance towards art and asserts: «It is not the value of the object that matters; it is the value that you want it to have.».
In the early 1960s, his early works were inspired by comics and supermarket goods, symbols of the popular universe. His emblematic series of Campbell Soup Cans was initiated in 1962 and would become recurrent. Several exhibitions organized by avant-garde galleries in New York and Los Angeles (Leo Castelli, Ferus Gallery, Sidney Janis Gallery) contributed to the dissemination of this movement, which then came to occupy the forefront of the artistic scene. The first series of Warhol’s works on film stars and glamour icons were then produced, including the serigraph portraits of Marilyn. Warhol presented himself as a total artist and mixed pictorial works with cinematic experiments and narcissism of a spectacular lifestyle that can be glimpsed in his films about the Factory, which had become the epicentre of a sulphurous nocturnal wildlife where one encounters the artists of the Velvet Underground. Starting in the 1970s, Warhol radically changed his approach and style, creating many commissioned works. In 1972, the silkscreen portraits of Mao addressed a provocative message during the Cold War. In 1976, Warhol created the series Skulls and Still Life. In the late 1970s, he resumed his emblematic works and created retrospective series. In the 1980s, he took up famous works from the history of art and reproduced them using his own artistic production techniques. Portraits and self-portraits multiplied. His death in 1987 marked the end of an era and his work has since enjoyed a similarly divisive and mythic aura.
