Andy Warhol Pop Art – Prints at Imagekind

Andy Warhol is one of the most iconic artists of the Pop Art genre, which found its inspiration in the ordinary images of everyday life. Andy Warhol's Pop Art is distinguished by its use of images found in popular culture during the 1950s and 60s. These images range from consumer products like Campbell’s soup cans to celebrity portraits such as Marylyn Monroe and Liza Minnelli. By displaying the same bright and repetitive images of celebrity’s faces and soup cans, the paintings of Andy Warhol were in direct response to the inundation of mass advertising.

Fittingly, it was in advertising where Andy Warhol began his career as an artist. He studied commercial art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and in 1949 moved to New York City where he began a successful career in advertising and magazine illustration. However, it was in the 1960s that Andy Warhol went from an advertising illustrator, to one of the most famous American artists. It was during the 1960s when Andy Warhol switched his technique to silkscreen and subsequently created some of his most famous art prints. The silkscreen process offered quick duplication, thus making the art not only about mass-produced items, but also allowing the art itself to be mass-produced.

When looking at the Pop Art a paintings of Andy Warhol, you will notice the bright primary colors of blues, reds and yellows injected on the common images of advertisements and consumer products. Andy Warhol also painted bright and chromatic images of celebrity faces including Marylyn Monroe, Beethoven and Mickey Mouse. Some of the most famous paintings of Andy Warhols Pop Art include a large Campbell’s tomato soup can displayed solo and the juxtaposing painting of 100 Campbell’s soup cans all painted one on top of the other. The repetition of cans, or sometimes celebrity’s faces, creates an excess of images common to a society flooded with media information.

However, Andy Warhol is not only one of the most prolific artists in painting, but in film as well. With little dialogue and plot most of his films are more obscure and experimental, not working in the way a typical film does. He created his most prominent and successful films in 1966 called Chelsea Girls, which projected two films at the same time while playing two different stories. Adjusting the sound differently while playing the two films revealed that films “plot” by lowering the sound of the other film.

Like much of Andy Warhol's Pop Art, his films also deal with images and ideas of how he interpreted and responded to popular culture. Often times his personal life allowed for direct inspiration of his artwork. Often times his paintings and films deal with elements of sexuality and in his personal case, homosexuality. Andy Warhol was one of the first major American artists to be openly gay while many of his most famous paintings and films alike draw from gay underground culture while exploring the complexity of sexuality and desire. Andy Warhol died on February 22 1987 at the age of 58. While in the hospital recovering from gallbladder surgery, the hospital staff negligently inundated his body with fluids thus causing him to die in his sleep from a sudden heart attack caused by water intoxication. He was buried outside of Pittsburg, next to his father and mother.