Reviving the Icon: Andy Warhol Takes Centre Stage as Artist of the Week!

American Artist, Andy Warhol, was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as Pop Art. Warhol’s style had a way of transforming pop culture into high art, and is known to be a bigger star since his death, in 1987, than he ever could’ve imagined in life. His work explores the relationship between artistic expression, advertising and the celebrity culture that had flourished by the 1960s. He once said “I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re so beautiful. Everything’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”

He moved to New York in 1949 and after exhibiting his work in several galleries (during the late 1950s) he began to receive recognition as a commercial and controversial artist/illustrator.

He worked with a variety of media including; painting, silk-screening, photography, film and sculpture but by 1963 he had moved from hand painting to silk-screening completely. Warhol once said “In my artwork, hand painting would take much too long, and anyway, that’s not the age we’re living in. Mechanical means are today… Silkscreen work is as honest a method as any” about his decision to change his process to his iconic style.

In 1963, Warhol found inspiration in Tod Browning’s silent film ‘Dracula’ – released in 1931 and chose to turn a pivotal scene from the film into one of his first silkscreen prints. That same year, Warhol began shooting his own Dracula-inspired movie with his Bolex camera.

In 1981, Warhol released the Myths series. One of his most iconic interpretations is of Dracula, of which we have a Limited Edition – 88 / 100 – for sale on our website. This print portrays the blood-sucking vampire with a haunting and dark palette.

The Myths series pieces are based on ancient beliefs, folklore, allegorical tales, traditional stories and media creations. They represent fantasies, dreams, hopes and fears, a point which is really driven home by the fact that some of the original pieces were embellished with diamond dust.

This series was created later in the artist’s career and can be interpreted as the artist developing a greater connection with himself and the world around him. Rather than using celebrities, the artist was inspired by characters. Characters were taken from 1950s television, old Hollywood films and Walt Disney cartoons. This choice pushes the narrative that the entertainment industry has an almost myth-making ability within it.

By the early 1960s, Warhol began to paint comic-strip characters and images derived from advertisements. He made art out of the very act of repetition itself by characterising subjects such as Coca-Cola bottles, Soup Cans and even popular celebrities of the time. His use of repetition, as well as his iconic silkscreen method, often alluded to the fast and widespread consumer culture.

This can be seen in the Limited Edition – 52 / 100 – ‘Triple Elvis’ print we have up for sale in the gallery for £650. Warhol used a publicity still of the famous singer from the 1960’s film ‘Flaming Star’. You can see Elvis is about to use a gun, an iconic and widely known representation of the singer. The original ‘Triple Elvis’ was sold at auction for $81.9m (£51.9m) in New York in November of 2014.

While in previous pieces Warhol has used famous movie stars as his subject, none of them achieved the star power that Elvis attracted during his early career in the mid-1950s. Since Warhol was obsessed and fascinated by pop culture, fame and celebrity, Elvis, who dominated pop culture, was an obvious subject for his work.

Warhol repeats the image of Elvis three times, each time producing a piece with unmatched clarity and depth, something different from any other Warhol pieces we have up in the gallery.
In the early 1970’s he began to paint again after taking a break (in which he delved into film and photography). He returned to gestural brushwork and produced monumental portraits.

This can be seen in the iconic Limited Edition – 77 / 100 – chromolithography print of Mick Jagger that is on display and up for sale for £550 in the gallery. The print has incorporated Warhol’s iconic and famous style, which he used consistently throughout the 1970s. His abstract shapes combined with his well-thought-out blocks of colours, have been placed with a structured base consisting of a pixelated image of the musician. This combination correlates and complements the musician’s style, allowing both the artist and the musician to shine through the work. This same style can be seen in the prints he did of Elvis, Chairman Mao and the Iconic Ladies and Gentleman Series, all of which we have on display.
In this 1975 series ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, Warhol depicts a series of black and Hispanic drag queens which he recruited from Greenwich Village. This provocative, ambiguous and direct series marks Warhol’s departure from portraiture and was based on his original yet appropriated images.

Warhol took an interest in the transvestite and drag community when he was commissioned by the Italian art dealer, Luciano Anselmino. The brief he was given was to create a series of artworks based on ‘impersonal and anonymous’ images of transvestites and drag queens. American society had just started to become more liberal in the 1970s and so many people in the community had only just started to embrace their sexuality, because of this many accepted the anonymity of the project with no issue. This was a project close to Warhol’s heart as he lived openly as a gay man prior to the gay liberation movement from the 1960s-1980s.

Once he decided to move on from silkscreen painting, you can see a style that is different yet still clearly the iconic Warhol style. This can be seen in our Limited Edition – 62/100 – chromolithography print of the singer and close friend of the artist, John Lennon. In an unusual turn of events Warhol didn’t use his own image of Lennon, instead, he used the 1971 photograph, taken by Ian Macmillan.

Lennon and his wife – Yoko Ono – became close friends with the artist during Warhol’s time in New York. They were often spotted at various social events around the city. Unfortunately, their friendship was short-lived when Lennon was shot in December of 1980. Before the singer died, he had asked Warhol to produce an album cover for his forthcoming album ‘Menlove Ave’.

The night Lennon died Warhol wrote in his diary “Someone came in and said John Lennon was shot and no one could believe it, so someone called the Daily News and they said it was true. It was scary; it was all anyone could talk about.” From various diary entries and the difference in his style you can see that this was something that hit Warhol hard. His diary entries make him sound shell-shocked and there is an element of detail in this piece that isn’t something Warhol gravitated towards naturally. It almost seemed like he was dissociating from what was happening and who he was looking at while he was creating the piece. Or as he would phrase it – instead of dissociating – it was like he was watching TV.

Prior to this event, when he himself was shot by the radical Feminist Valerie Solanas, in June of 1968, he made the statement “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but it’s actually the way things happen in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you it’s like watching television – you don’t feel anything. Right when I was being shot, and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.

Warhol produced two versions of the image which were used for the front and back of the album. He chose blue and red as his choice of colours. As you can see, we have the blue. The choice of blue and red is a bold one, the significance of the colours shines through. The sadness and anger boiling through the piece only for Lennon’s peaceful gaze, relaxed demeanour and unkempt tussled hair radiates the singers living energy out through the piece.

If you have any questions about the artwork or Warhol himself, feel free to get in touch! Or pop into the gallery and we can have a conversation about this classic artist.