Andy Warhol Kept Me Drawing by Dave Jaffe: Part One.

    Andy Warhol Kept Me Drawing: Part One




    It's possible to like an artist's work but dislike his or her character. Andy Warhol's an example of this.
    A few weeks ago I was going to stop painting and drawing, which I've done as a hobby for decades. Yet then I came across a small book on Andy Warhol, written by the British artist and writer, Trewin Copplestone.
     After thumbing through Copplestsone's book called 'The Life and Works of Andy Warhol'  I decided to copy Warhol's painting style and go back to drawing. Warhol's art inspired me. Warhol's life was a classic American rags to riches story, that also interested me.
     He was born Andrew Warhola to a poor immigrant family from Slovakia in 1928. The next year the Great Depression started and wrecked the world economy. Warhol's family was hit hard by this terrible economic collapse.
     So Warhol grew up in a poor blue collar family in Pittsburgh, a tough provincial city of steel mills in the American heartland. Yet Warhol's family in the end struggled out of poverty.  His father, who passed away when Andrew was quite young, left a sizeable sum of money behind to help his son. For there were some fine educational places and schools in Pittsburgh. Warhol ended up going to the Cranegie Institute of Technology. Here he got a good education in the visual arts.
      "If anyone had asked me at the time who was the least likely to succeed," said one of his teachers at the institute named Robert Lipper, "I would have said Andrew Warhola."
    Warhola, as his last name was then, was shy and had problems doing academic work. He had, he later claimed, three nervous breakdowns before the age of ten. His skin often erupted into some form of acne. And his hair fell out at a very young age. People, including his older brothers, taunted and bullied him.
      Yet Warhol had a great drawing ability and some self-confidence. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute in the late 1940's, he went along with another soon-to-be-famous visual artist called Philip Pearlstein to New York City. He came there with only $200 in his pocket, which is about $2,000 to-day.Yet by 1956, he'd become one of the most successful commercial artists in the United States. By now he'd dropped the 'a' at the end of his name and was simply known now as 'Andy Warhol'. Also his mother had moved to New York City and stayed with her youngest son for the rest of her life.
    Though now rich and successful Warhol still wanted more. "I want to be Matisse," he told his friend Charles Lisanby when they took a tour around part of the world in 1956. Lisanby thought Warhol was really saying, "I want to be as famous as Henri Matisse."  Back in 1956 Matisse and Pablo Picasso were seen as the greatest artists of the day.
     Still by 1966, or ten years later, Warhol was even more famous than Matisse. He painted than silkscreened pictures of Campbell soup cans, the U.S. dollar bill, the by now dead Marilyn Monroe, the soon to be dead Elvis Presley, and car crashes, race riots and electric chairs. Warhol was now acclaimed - or detested- as one of the founders of the art movement now called "Pop Art".