Bowi Bowie

In Andy Warhol’s time he was seen as very commercial and not truly a defined artist. Warhol was very popular to average society but never quite Throughout his whole life he has had struggles with Sydenham’s chorea, terrible shyness, and lastly making artwork acceptable to other artists. And as we get farther from his time we see how much value and meaning there was in his work.

When considering the life and works of Andy Warhol, one thing is agreed upon for good or bad, he changed the visual construction of the world we live in. His window advertisements were the beginning of an era, where art would be seen in an array of forms away from the traditional paintings and sculptures of the old world. He made people see everyday material objects in a whole new light; through "Pop Art" he could transform mundane into extraordinary. He was a working man, a social climber, a builder, an acquirer of goods, and a known homosexual. These attributes all contributed to the interesting and complicated nature of his art.

Peyton's small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely compassionate, intimate, and even personal. Together, her works capture an art that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. An oil on canvas representing John Lennon was sold for a record $800 000 in 2006 (relate back to figure 2). “A beautiful presentation of the stylish artist's celebrated drawings and paintings” described here by Laura Hoptman.

America’s infatuation with labels was a relatively new trend in postmodern society. Andy Warhol’s “Silver Liz as Cleopatra” as well as his other pieces impacted societal views on modern art in relationship to value. Warhol had a strong belief that the loss of something in replicating an image was over powered by something of new value being created.

Even in his very early year of life, Andy Warhol knew that he wanted to grow up and be a part of the artistic world. Throughout his life, his dreams and aspirations were focused on creating art. His aspirations were so obvious in fact, that his father was able to recognize his talents and begin saving money for him to receive a college education. This education was relatively rare during the 1940’s, and therefore set him apart from many other artists of the time. Throughout his later life, Warhol was able to represent himself as an artist who did not conform to the norms of society at the time. His creative use of Pop Art is something that is still very relevant even in today’s society.

Andy Warhol being not simply a Pop artist, but an American artist who was known as the master of Pop Art, and about two of Warhol’s most famous paintings; Coca-Cola and Campbell’s Soup Cans. Andy Warhol was an artist and filmmaker, an initiator for the Pop Art movement in the 1960s. Warhol used mass production techniques to elevate art into the supposed unoriginality of the commercial culture of the United States. Warhol’s early drawings frequently recalls the Anglo-Saxon tradition of nonsense humor, a characteristically childlike exuberance, and the fact that Warhol was successfully earning a living in the advertising industry at the time was sufficient for many to dismiss his entire artistic output during this period as “commercial art”. Fifty years ago, Pop art captured the spirit of Warhol’s young art, but that basic structure has been (to most people) a revealing profitless movement for years. Pop art was a 1960s movement that focused on everyday objects, comic books and mediated images — now seems quaint and playful, but not Warhol. In the first part of Andy Warhol’s career he was an iconoclast, in the second, the artist as businessman. In 1960 Warhol’s graphic works underwent a fundamental change in terms of subject matter, accompanied at about the same time by a change in technique. Warhol’s graphic work covers areas not normally associated with the art of the twentieth century, and which might even be considered unique. In Andy Warhol’s paintings and prints of

Berger highlights this difference by giving examples of Mrs. Siddons by Gainsborough and Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe which, although have outstanding elements of a painting but fail to be ‘objects of envy’.

confronted what made art “art”, and redefined it throughout the span of his career. Personally,

One of his jobs was to design the weather map for NBC’s morning news. In 1952 Warhol held his first exhibit, it was not a financial success, but it enhanced Warhol’s reputation as a commercial artist. But his spare time was now taken up with pop art, inspired by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, two young pop artist, Warhol had come across in 1958. He began to paint, draw and print everyday objects such as, dollar bills, soup cans, postage stamps, comic strips, and soda bottles. According to Warhol, these were some of the consumer products “on which America is built.”

Many discover life in the paintings of a dead artist in the most miniscule details: the number of colours used in a painting, the size of a flower, or the expression of a model. Looking back, one can remember how middle school art teachers would indulge our imaginations with lectures on the curiously complex intentions behind every colourful stroke of the painters brush. However, letters exchanged between artist reveal the truth behind not only the intentions of an artist but also the tactics used to create the sacrosanct works of art produced by one. Currently there are 844 surviving Vincent van Gogh letters, over 900 paintings, and over 1100 drawings. One man's life has been compiled into a medium sized pile of canvas, wood, and paper,

Following the transformation to “popular” of the world, the new art movement had occurred, Pop Art. Pop artists began to look for inspiration in the world around them, representing—and, at times, making art directly from—everyday items, consumer goods, and mass media. When it emerged in the 1960s, Pop art was not just about bold colors and celebrity culture; it brought the popular world—from cartoons and advertising to apples and bananas—into the realm of high art, turning taste on its head in the process. It was in this climate of turbulence, experimentation, and consumerism that a new generation of artists emerged in Britain and America in the mid- to late-1950s. They did this in a straightforward manner, using bold swaths of primary colors, often

Eduardo Paolozzi played an immeasurable role in the artistic development of the Independent Group (IG) in England in the 1950s and 1960s. Through his collages, prints, and sculptures, Paolozzi shaped the proto-pop movement in England by reacting to mass consumer culture and modernity as it was perceived to be advancing in the United States. As Lawrence Alloway argues, “Since 1953, Paolozzi has pursued the human in art,” connecting dissimilar objects, themes, and image sources to form new and evocative relationships between images (Alloway 1956, p. 29). My research focused in particular on his collage pieces, a fundamental medium and philosophy that stimulated both his own development as an artist, the ideas of the Independent Group, and the

I chose to investigate McQueen’s work due to the ‘romantic but determinedly contemporary’ (Dazed article) edge to his work, and bold range of influences; leading him to create diverse collections including many aesthetically and structurally urban pieces, but still within his ‘electric, eccentric’ (McQueen) style. His work is so inspiring me due to

[The] Future collectors will look longingly at these portraits, often pathetic and always sensitive, and wish for “the good old romantic days of the nineteen-twenties and thirties”. They will not know how few and far between suitable subjects were, nor how many miles the Vyses tramped on dusty or muddy roads seeking “types”. They are all slowly, but inevitably disappearing and it is well that their recorder has fashioned them before they join the Dodo. 15-

From the heavy use of amphetamines to the leniency around free love, as ‘a microcosm of the era its self’ the Silver Studio embodied all that the decade’s rebels were discovering: politics and protest, style, excess and the fame that followed (Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film). As a result of the experimentation that took place, the fifth floor Midtown Manhattan loft emitted a certain ‘aura’ that was evident in both the would-be stars Warhol invited in, the ‘junkies and musicians, technicians and friends’, and the artworks he was able to produce thanks to them. (Finkelstein, Warhol, and McGarry, 2007:63) In truth, it was a sense of detachment from all but his ‘constellation of… Factory associates’ that gifted Warhol the perspective to document the era as he did. (Watson,