Andy Warhol

4 Pages 936 Words

ANDY WORHOL
The Dark Side

It is rare for an artist to become a celebrity, but Andy Warhol experienced much more than his fifteen minutes of fame and became an icon of his generation. Warhol was involved in many artistic fields that included painting, filmmaking, publisher, record producer, and photography, but at the same time he was a businessman, social commentator and self-promoter. He was a major contributor to the Pop Art movement, a period when mainstream objects such as comic strips, advertisements, and celebrity photos, were incorporated into many works. Warhol’s “Campbell Soup” series and later his “Celebrity” series are some of the most well known works of Pop Art that are still used in print and advertising today.
However, not all of his works dealt with intriguing celebrities or mainstream advertising. Scores of artists have revealed more than one side of their persona and Warhol had an area within himself that was different than the bulk of his visual output that seemed a bit morbid. Warhol’s darker side is evident in his “Death and Disaster” series. This was a period in which he related such tragedies as car accidents, suicide, capital punishment, and gang warfare that seems to be more than a passing interest for Warhol. These morbid works differ from his Pop Art pieces and are a part of trying to understand Warhol’s catalogue of work.
Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 with a degree in pictorial design. He then went to New York City to work as a commercial illustrator and later began painting towards the late 1950’s. His work did not begin to be noticed until around 1962 when his “Campbell Soup” prints and “Marilyn Monroe” silk screens grabbed the interest of the art world.
However this period was a difficult time in Warhol’s life. He was not yet a celebrity and he had just revealed to the world that he was a homosexual, while at the same...