Is Andy Warhol a Genius of Art and Culture?

Warhol wanted to capture the moments of protesters being attacked by police force to draw the issue to the public’s attention. He wanted his art piece to preserve a portion of these black protesters lives; what exactly they went through to receive the equality they now have today.

When we eat a slice of pizza we tend to wash it down with a bottle of Coke when we 're feeling sick we tend to have some Campbell 's chicken noodle soup when we think of rock 'n ' roll the name Elvis Presley comes to mind and for America 's sweetheart and movie actress there is none other than Marilyn Monroe. These for iconic objects and figures all have one thing in common they have stood the test of time and continue to be a part of American culture. Today I 'm going to talk about one man who took these ideas and started a new movement in the early 1960s it movement coined pop art where everyday recognizable images that have stood the test of time and continue to influence and be a part of American culture. This man goes by the name of Andy Warhol.

Did you know that Andy Warhol was a hypochondriac? What a hypochondriac is, is a person who is abnormally anxious about their own health issues. In my opinion I think that Andy Warhol was a really great artist. My favorite thing that he painted is his famous ‘Coca cola bottle’, the year he painted it was in 1962.

Reading about Andy Warhol and his early stages as an iconic pop artist, Before and After attracts my attention, a black and white big size piece which shows a profile of a woman before and after a nose plastic surgery. Arthur C. Danto believes Andy Warhol is a person who can make an art piece out of nothing. ”Before Warhol, Before and After would have been a piece of boilerplate commercial art, whose maker would be long forgotten.” (Dante, 2) I agree

In the late 1950’s, Warhol began to have the interest in painting. He painted his first well-known paintings, which was based on comics, and ads he found in 1961. The next year the big spots lights came on and he had his big introduction on the Campbell’s Soup Can series, which changed him completely. Shortly after, Warhol got the inspiration and started working on a large variety of movie star portraits, including Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and the biggest of all Marilyn Monroe. Using screen-printing process, and knowing that Marilyn was one of the biggest deaths in a while, he decided to take that for granted and come up with this marvilent idea to make him go viral.

For the second art encounter I visited the Museum of Art at BYU and viewed the Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso print exhibit.There were several other modernist artist on display in the exhibit, such as Lichtenstein and Kalloeitz, however Warhol and Picasso were the artist that are most talked about in this course. Both of these artist are considered to be modernist, however their works look very different. Andy Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe print was on display showing the industrial, pop side of modernist art. Warhol’s art imitates the negative social norms of the time. His lowd use of neon color and choice of subject add to the growing popularity of veneration of celebrities. He also was one of the first artist to mass produce his art, adding

The sixties were a time of social and political change in America, and the art world was not left untouched. Early in the decade a new movement focused on popular culture and national icons began to develop. It was aptly named Pop art. "Many critics were alarmed by Pop, uncertain whether it was embracing or parodying popular culture and fearful that it threatened the survival of both modernist art and high culture..." (Stokstad 1101) Pop artists were not the first to make cultural statements with their work, however controversial art always draws criticism and attention. One of the most well known artists of the Pop movement was Andy Warhol, a young commerial illustrator from manhattan. Warhol's use of popular icons and brands as the focus

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.

The leader of Pop Art, Andrew Warhola, was born on August 6th, 1928. His parents Ondrej and Ulja Warhola were both Czechoslovakian immigrants, before giving birth, they moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ondrej and Ulja had two elder sons named John and Paul. During his adolescence years, a plethora of different health disorders had affected Andrew, such as; Sydenham’s chorea and Scarlet fever. Andrew constantly received treatment which caused him to develop a fear towards hospitals. As he had poor health conditions, Andrew missed school and became an introvert confining himself to the solitude of his room; listening to the radio, collecting pictures, and becoming obsessed with celebrities. These activities initiated him to

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

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Warhol’s birthplace features his legacy on seven floors of gallery and exhibition space. The museum features an art collection which includes 900 paintings, more than 1,000 prints and 4,000 photographs, an archives collection containing Warhol’s papers and collectibles, and a film & video

Almost every person who knows anything about the art world has heard of the artist named Andy Warhol. A prominent figure in his field during his time, he had a large influence on the public, as well as other artists of that day. He inspired many and brought a new flair to art that made people happy during a time of innovation and change, some good some bad. He is still widely known and recognized today by older and younger generations, who all agree that his art is and always will be timeless. Artists that came after him look at him with admiration, and use his influences and creativity to create and discover new ways to make magnificent art.

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.”

Postmodernism is an artistic theory and a social mindset that sought to break the shackles of the so called modernist art society. Famous artist kept getting recognition as their pieces were critiqued by famous critics and was deemed ‘High art’, as it was separated and elevated from other art forms. This practice excluded the masses from being a part of the art of that time and reserved it for the high class society. Many artists rose to counteract this movement, one of which was Andy Warhol, who “emerged as specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism… which conquered… the art gallery”. (Jameson 111). Thus the post-modernism movement was in its essence a reaction against modern art ideas. Andy Warhol who gained fame in the 1960’s, characterized his pieces using all the elements from this movement. His work lacked any arbitrary meaning nor any deep ideas about the facets of human life or nature for example, and this exact idea changed the art world and made him a trailblazer of the postmodern art period. His creations embodied post modernistic ideals and illustrated it through his pieces and his use of the media.