Andy Warhol and His Art- Part Two

Andy Warhol - Part Two


    In the early 1960's, Andy Warhol became a pop artist. Silkscreened pictures of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Campbell soup cans and imitation Brillo Boxes poured out of Warhol's studio that he called 'The Factory'. Warhol did some of the silk screening but other silk screen portraits and pictures were churned out by his assistants.
    Some older artists didn't like Warhol or his his lifestyle that they assumed was gay. "You're too swish,"  near pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns told Andy when he asked why they stayed away from him. Interestingly enough, both Rauschenberg and Johns were themselves gay and had been lovers. Yet Warhol kept on producing art and growing his fortune.
    He produced and directed movies, most of which bored audiences. He founded a rock group called 'The Velvet Underground' and began to hang out with the rich and the famous which he was now too. At an art get together in the mid-1960's in Philadelphia Warhol showed up with one of his superstars, namely Edie Sedgewick. The crowd was so great that it nearly crushed Warhol and Sedgewick. In 'The Factory' speed freaks, substance abusers and the truly insane swirled around him.
     One of these disturbed groupies was Valerie Solanas, head of SCUM, or the Society for Cutting Up Men. On June 3,1968 she pumped a number of bullets into Warhol and nearly killed him. Mario Amaya, an art critic was slightly wounded by Solanas but he recovered quite easily.
     Warhol wasn't so lucky. He survived but barely. At one point in hospital Warhol was pronounced to be dead. and he was never the same man afterwards. "It's the way things happen in life that's unreal," Warhol said about his near death.
    After this terrible trauma, Warhol became far more reclusive. He moved to a new office that was well guarded. He started a magazine about celebrities called 'Interview'. He published books like 'The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back'. He said things that were always quotable.
    "Everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes," he once said. And when asked about the Vietnam War that was raging in the 1960's, he once replied, "It's happening."
     Then in the 1980's he befriended younger artists like Jean Michel Basquiat who later died of a drug overdose. He started partying again. His inventive days were over but sometimes his art surprised people. He did a series on Chairman Mao which were basically huge photos of China's ruler that Warhol touched up with smears of paint. And in this vein he made lots of money photographing the rich and the famous then touching up the photos with paint.
     Warhol loved to eat chocolates. This may have inflamed his gall bladder. He went into a hospital in February 1987 for a routine gall bladder operation. Yet he died in the hospital at the age of 58. Warhol's death staggered the art world. In death as in life Andy Warhol was always news.
     Obituaries focused on Warhol's personality, and his pictures or silk screens of soup cans movie stars and celebrities. Others mentioned his disaster series or pictures of car crashes, race riots and electric chairs. A few mentioned his religious pictures that were often copies of 'The Last Supper' Clearly Warhol was an outstanding artist.