Andy Warhol The Father Of Pop Art

Andy Warhol was a very famous figure of the New York City art world in the 1960s. His parents had left their village in the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Slovenia and moved to Pittsburgh, as so many have, for better opportunities in the New World.

Andy was born in Pittsburgh in 1928. He was the youngest of four children and he was definitely "different". Recognizing his talents, his father, a construction laborer, started a fund for Andy's education.

Andy graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh at the age of 21 and then moved to New York City where he became an illustrator, in which profession he did very well indeed. He drew advertisements, book jackets, magazine illustrations and all the other things that successful commercial artists draw. By 1960, he was able to buy a four story town house on New York's Upper East Side.

But Andy wanted more; he wanted to be a real artist. Therefore, in 1962 he arranged to have an exhibition of his work in a gallery in Los Angeles. What did he show? The entire exhibit was a collection of thirty-two paintings of Campbell's soup cans, each a different variety of soup. Each painting was 20" by 16" and was done in synthetic polymer paint. The exhibit was titled, "32 Campbell's Soup Cans".

The art world went nuts! Warhol became famous overnight. Ordinary people (like me!) who knew nothing about fine art couldn't believe an artist would have the nerve to exhibit paintings of soup cans. Could Andy Warhol be serious? Evidently he could, because in 1964 he exhibited a collection of---Brillo Soap Pad Boxes!

He was now a mega-celebrity in New York City. His art studio was called the Factory and it was a real happening place. His friends, who hung out at the Factory, had strange names like Ultra Violet and Ingrid Superstar. When New York newspaper columnists had nothing else to write about, there would always be fresh material in the goings-on at the Factory. Anyone who was anyone, like Mick Jagger for instance, visited Andy at the factory. His work was even written up, now, in "TIME" magazine.

Andy was slight of stature, gay, blond, and he had bad skin. He once had his nose sandpapered, but it didn't help his skin problems. However, he had a certain charisma. People from all walks of life were drawn to him, so he had a constant stream of visitors at the Factory. Andy was the queen bee at the Factory. Everyone wanted his attention. Everyone wanted to be close to Andy.

Some thought he "looked like an angel". Others thought differently; Truman Capote called him "a hopeless born loser" and a certain gallery owner was known to have pronounced him "a terrible little man". But that was before Andy made it big. After he became famous, he could do as he pleased and everyone thought whatever he did was wonderful.

Warhol made long movies of things that didn't move. He wrote a book, using a tape recorder, the name of which was "a". But he worked hard at his art, as well. It's not easy to paint two thousand pictures of Mao Zedong. The boredom factor alone would cause most people to give up long before he had finished, say, fifty of them. Later he got assistants and began to use silk- screening in his work.

By the way, these portraits were not to be sold separately. The art work was the unit of "2000 Mao Portraits", just as his first big exhibit was called "32 Campbell's Soup Cans". All thirty-two were bought by one collector as a unit, and are now housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I never could imagine giving house room to thirty-two pictures of soup cans, but I am the dumb one. In 1986, a collector bought Andy's silkscreen "200 One Dollar Bills" and sold it twenty-three years later for $43.7 million, reaping a profit of more than one hundred times what he had paid for it.

There were lots of sexual happenings at the Factory. Warhol was thought by some to dislike being touched but he certainly like to watch other people having sex. The unusual folks who hung out at the Factory provided sex of every description for Andy to watch. Andy probably did not have sex himself until he was about twenty-five years old, but afterward he was known to have had lots of boyfriends. Rumors of all the sexual escapades at the factory added spice to the growing legend of Andy Warhol.

Warhol was an avant-garde film maker. One of the movies he shot was forty-five minutes of a man eating a mushroom. Another was eight hours of the Empire State Building at sunset. He had no shortage of young girls or young men who wanted to star in his films, usually for no pay. Drugs were also plentiful at the Factory, but it is said that the only things Andy took were diet pills.

One of the people who drifted in and out of the Factory was Valerie Solanas, who was trying to interest Andy in filming her play, "Up Your Ass". She left her only copy of the script with Andy, who probably threw it on a slush pile with lots of other spec scripts. When Valerie wanted the script back, it couldn't be found.

On the afternoon of June 3rd, 1986, Valerie arrived at the Factory to talk to Andy again. While she was there, Andy received a phone call. When he answered it, Valerie pulled out a gun and shot three times at Andy. The first two shots missed, but the third one did not. While Andy was lying bleeding on the floor, Valerie put the gun to the head of Fred Hughes, Andy's manager, and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. Just then the elevator arrived. The door opened. It was empty. Fred said, "Look, Valerie. There's the elevator. Why don't you get on?" Valerie said, "Oh, that's a good idea." And she did.

Andy nearly died, but he eventually recovered. Afterward, the Factory was never the free and easy place it had been. Andy was terrified of the same thing happening again. Indeed, on Christmas Eve in 1968, Andy received a phone call from Valerie in which she demanded that he pay her twenty thousand dollars for her "Up Your Ass" script, drop all criminal charges against her, star her in a movie, and arrange for her to appear on the Johnny Carson show. As she said, "You know, I could always do it again..."

Valerie spent a year in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital. In June of 1969, she was sentenced to prison for three years, with her time in Bellevue deducted.

In 1987, Andy, although he was terrified of doctors and hospitals, entered the hospital for the routine removal of a diseased gall bladder. Everything went well, but suddenly early the next morning, Andy Warhol died, probably of cardiac arrest. He was fifty-eight years old.

Andy Warhol is known as being one of the founders of, and a major figure in, the Pop Art movement. Another of his enduring legacies is his observation that everyone will have his fifteen minutes of fame.

Louis Menand, an art critic, writing in the January 11, 2010 issue of "The New Yorker" had this to say about Pop Art: "Pop showed that in the end the only difference between an art work, such as a sculpture that looks like a grocery carton, and a real thing, such as a grocery carton, is that the first is received as art and the second is not. At that moment, art could be anything it wanted. The illusion-barrier had been broken".

Andy Warhol's fame has endured. Many, many books have been written about him. The sixties were a strange and wonderful era in American History and Andy Warhol was one of the seminal stars of that era. His legacy lives on.

Although Andy Warhol might be considered by many folks in the American heartland, when they consider him at all, to be just another fruitcake among the plethora of strange people rising to notoriety and fame in the volatile 1960s in New York City ("Pictures of Campbell soup cans is ART?") , Andy Warhol today is still an icon of contemporary art and culture.

He replied, when asked why he painted Campbell soup cans, that he wanted "to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it."

Andy Warhol died in early 1987. He was buried in his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. Thousands of mourners paid their respects at a memorial service soon after in New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Andy's will dictated that, after a few bequests to family members, his huge collection of art and personal possessions should be used to set up a foundation devoted to the "advancement of the visual arts". This was done. The Andy Warhol Foundation For The Visual Arts became an extremely influential philanthropic organization. The mission of the Foundation is to foster the work of creative artists in all fields of the visual arts. The Foundation supplies grants to not-for-profit organizations, mostly in the US, that support these artists.

Andy felt that the arts are essential to an "open and enlightened democracy". To that end, the Foundation strives to vigorously protect the freedom of artistic expression. Since its beginning, the Warhol Foundation has given more than two hundred million dollars to worthwhile projects in all fifty states.

In November of 2010, The Board of the Warhol Foundation was pleased to be a main supporter of one of the first large exhibitions of homosexually-themed art, "Hide/Seek:Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, a division of the Smithsonian Institute.

However, many oh-so-Christ-like people from the Catholic League and several Right-wing Congress folks protested the exhibition. The National Portrait Gallery caved. It removed a video entitled, "A Fire In My Belly", by David Wojnarowicz. The video contained about eleven seconds of large ants crawling over a crucifix, the ants symbolizing the pain of Jesus.

Just as a book banned in Boston becomes an instant best seller, the banishment of "A Fire In My Belly" created a sensation. People all over the country were agog to view the notorious video. It is now available in galleries in major cities from NY to LA to which the curious are flocking.

Joel Wachs, the Foundation's president, sent a stern letter to the Smithsonian. It said, in part, "Such blatant censorship is unconscionable, It is inimical to everything the Smithsonian Institution should stand for and everything the Andy Warhol Foundation does stand for."

Mr. Wachs said, further, "We cannot stand by and watch the Smithsonian bow to the demands of bigots who have attacked the exhibition out of ignorance, hatred and fear."

The bottom line: Either restore the video to the Exhibition or there will be no money coming from the Andy Warhol Foundation to the Smithonian in the future. As of this writing, it is a stand-off. However, remember the old adage, "He who has the gold makes the rules"...Wanna bet who will win?