Who Is the Famous Person in Andy Warhols Art
Manufactures & Features
Andy Warhol Portraits: A Definitive Guide
By Naomi Martin
"The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine."
Andy Warhol, Art News, 1962
The Art of Screen-Press
Campbell soup cans, Brillo boxes, Marylin Monroe'south portrait reiterated in bright and vivid colours – Andy Warhol produced some of the most iconic images of the 20thursday century, establishing himself as ane of the nigh influential artists of all fourth dimension. A leading figure of the Pop Art movement, Warhol was enthralled by the aesthetics of fame and popular civilization, and although his artistic talent covered a wide range of visual media, he is especially renowned for his screen-printed artworks, which utterly transformed mod art. Throughout his career, Warhol screen-printed deputed portraits from photographs, but besides appropriated images of celebrities, turning them into silkscreen prints reflecting his fascination with fame while dealing with deeper problems of identity, legacy, and death.
Fatigued to the mechanical nature of the procedure, Warhol turned to photographic screen-printing in 1962, which gave him the freedom to reproduce with ease the imagery of pop civilisation and mass-media he was fascinated with. While he did not invent the screen-press procedure per se, Warhol notwithstanding developed his own distinctive technique combining brightly coloured hand-painted stencils with photographs. Despite being initially attracted to the mechanical and mass-produced aspect, his technique was so distinctive that his silkscreen-prints would exist – and still are – instantly identified as 'Warhols'. From celebrities to political figures and of class, himself, nosotros dive into Andy Warhol's most significant screen-print portraits.
Warhol'south Celebrities
Warhol's fascination with popular culture and fame led him to produce a great deal of screen-prints depicting portraits of celebrities, experimenting with variations in colours and multiplication. Seriality was something which captivated Warhol, the concept of repetition became one of his strategies inside the neo-avant-garde, which challenged all traditional notions of art. The repetition and mechanisation of his work also denoted the underlying dark side of Pop Fine art, implying emotional detachment and loss of identity in the wake of a boom of mass-consumption – in particular the thought that fame and celebrities were a consumable and expendable product. Today, these massively recognisable portraits epitomise the very imagery of popular civilization.
During the early 1960s, while living and working in New York, Warhol started to create his celebrity portraits. Using tabloid photographs or publicity shots for his screen-prints, Warhol produced an impressive number of celebrity portraits, including Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy and Marylin Monroe, who was Warhol's first silkscreen-print subject. Upon the actress's death in 1962, Warhol instantly began to reproduce her portrait, based on a photograph from 1953 taken by Gene Kornman for the promotion of Niagara. Marilyn Diptych 1962 is arguably one of Warhol'south most iconic and celebrated works, made up of 2 canvases repeating Monroe'southward portrait in a filigree pattern. I side is bright and vibrant, the other monochrome and gloomy – two contrasting sides capturing both the star's sparkling public façade, and the dim reality of her hard and troubled individual life.
Although Warhol expanded his subject field matter throughout the years, his obsession with fame and celebrity endured as he connected to produce celebrity portraits in the later on part of his career, including Judy Garland, Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry and Dolly Parton.
"Isn't life a serial of images that change as they echo themselves?"
Andy Warhol
Commissioned Portraits
In the mid-sixties and early on 70s, Warhol truly revolutionized and revived the social portrait as a legitimate art form. The artist started to work on commissions, and would rarely refuse any. His first commissioned society portrait was of Ethel Scull in 1963, a well-known collector of modern and Popular Art. In November 1979, Warhol'south major exhibition Portraits of the 70s opened at the Whitney Museum, and allowed his individual portrait-painting business to flourish extensively.
In the early eighties, Warhol was painting almost fifty clients a yr, charging around $25,000 per committee, and $twoscore,000 for a 2-panel portrait – using this lucrative business to fund his other ambitious projects and sustain The Factory. Substantially a commercial enterprise, these society portraits bolstered Warhol's examination of himself as a 'automobile', and played off of his enthrallment with fame, sustained by his famous motto: "In the future, everyone volition be famous for 15 minutes."
For his portraits, Warhol would use a Polaroid camera to shoot his subjects – referring to information technology as his 'pencil and paper'. The Polaroids would then be blown up and converted into negatives, from which Warhol would trace the sitter'south characteristic onto a canvas and create his silkscreen-prints. For Warhol, the potential of photography to shape and reaffirm the cultural obsessions of the public was essential, which is why he would likewise use it as a filter to mediate with lodge. More than and so, the use of Polaroids was an extremely fitting medium to reinforce his concerns with the ephemerality of fame and appearances. Warhol was also an animal lover, and subsequently created commissioned portraits of pets throughout his career.
Fellow Artists and Trailblazers
Throughout his career, Warhol did not solely work on commissioned portraits, simply as he broadened his selection of subject thing in the 1970s and 1980s, he started to create images of the people he deeply admired, in particular boyfriend artists. Dada creative person Homo Ray was one of Warhol's heroes, he based his portrait on a Polaroid picture he took of him in 1973. Warhol likewise painted portraits of artists with whom he developed a close friendship, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Yves Saint-Laurent.
Amidst Warhol'due south almost popular portraits, Mao Zedong was painted in 1972. Bruno Bischofberger, Warhol'due south long-time dealer, was the one suggesting the thought of a portrait of one of the near important political figures of the 20th century. Later reading in Life Magazine that Mao was indeed the most famous person in the world, Warhol was drawn to the idea of creating his portrait, thus renewing his focus on fame and celebrity. Between 1972 and 1973, Warhol created 199 Mao paintings in flamboyant colours, suggesting a parallel between propaganda and capitalist advertising. Similarly, Warhol later conceived a serial of portraits of Bolshevik Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, playing with the boundaries between fame and political agenda. These Lenin paintings were the last major torso of work Warhol completed prior to his death in 1987.
Portrait Serial
Oft deputed, Andy Warhol also worked on portrait series throughout his career, such as the Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century serial of 1980 and the 1985 Reigning Queens series, which included images of the four female monarchs who were ruling at that detail moment in fourth dimension – Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Beatrix of the netherlands, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland. Warhol also worked on his Athletes series between 1977 and 1979, which, just like the Reigning Queens and Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century series, focused on fame and glory.
One of Warhol'southward most poignant series was Ladies and Gentlemen, redefining perceptions of gender and calling attending to the marginalized drag queen community of the lower Manhattan. Afterward the Stonewall Riots of 1969, and following the death of Manufactory Transvestite Superstar Candy Darling, Warhol was deputed by Italian fine art dealer Luciano Anselmino in 1974 to paint 105 portraits of elevate queens, in four different sizes. Eager to explore this particular subject field affair, Warhol created more than than double the number of portraits commissioned, taking over 500 Polaroids with fourteen dissimilar models, and explored the subject through multiples format.
Local drag queen and actress Wilhelmina Ross in particular appears in 73 of Warhol's portraits, embodying both the glamour of his pop aesthetic and his preparedness to embrace marginalised sub-cultures.
Self-Portraits
Images of Andy Warhol himself are only as popular as his art. The pop artist spent his life redefining the paradigm he would present to the world through self-portraits – from his early photo-booth-mode portraits of 1963, to his spectral Self-Portrait with Fright Wig of 1986, taken merely a few months before his unexpected death.
Self-portraiture has always been a archetype fine art-historical do, and was an extremely important element of Warhol's body of work. Conscious of the superficial nature of fame in order, Andy Warhol endeavoured to create a compelling public image, fashioning his own 'brand', and thus cultivating his own celebrity. Drawing on his trademark nighttime spectacles and straight, blonde hair, Warhol often wore disguises or accentuated certain aspects of his appearance, emerging equally a caricature of himself, virtually fabricating his ain image. From cocky-consciousness to a human being haunted by the inevitability of decease, Warhol'due south numerous self-portraits shift back and along between vulnerability and conviction, superficiality and depth, equally asserting his obsession with both fame and mortality.
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The Andy Warhol Museum
Read near the friendship betwixt Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol
Source: https://magazine.artland.com/andy-warhol-portraits-a-definitive-guide/
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