Andy Warhol Biography and List of Works

American artist, filmmaker, the best-known figure to emerge from the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Warhol eliminated individuality from his works and avoids serious interpretations of his art. He declared that he wanted to be a machine, something that makes, not paintings, but industrial productions.

"I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked. It's not just that it's part of my image not to tell everything, it's just that I forget what I said the day before, and I have to make it all up over again."
(Warhol in Mike Wrenn's book Andy Warhol: in his own words, 1991)

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Czech immigrants. His father, who travelled much on business trips, died when Warhol was 13. When he was a child, Warhol had three nervous breakdowns. He studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and worked as an advertising draughtsman and illustrator in New York. The film director Emile de Antonio encouraged him to start as a free artist - Antonio considered commercial art real art and he also helped such painters as Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg. Warhol had seen Roy Liechtenstein's work in the late 1950s and was surprised that somebody else dealt with same ideas. In 1960 Warhol made his first comic strip painting, "Dick Tracy". Along with the superabundance of consumer goods, Warhol turned his attention to supermarket products. He borrowed banal mass-produced objects and exhibited them in the artistic context of a gallery - as Marcel Duchamp had already done in the 1910s with his urinal and bottle-rack. Warhol's first solo exhibition was in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. In Brillo (1964), acrylic silkscreen on wood, Warhol parodies high-art seriousness and consumerism. With silk screens of Marilyn Monroe prints and Campbell's soup cans Warhol became a detached reporter of the times. To the question of "Why soup cans" Warhol replied that he "used to drink it... same lunch every day for twenty years... the same thing over and over again... I liked the idea." He also produced "do-it-yourself" painting kits and in 1962 he "painted a portrait" of something that he had always been fond of - bank notes.

More than any other pop artists, Warhol was concerned with death. Many of his pictures have morbid associations: Mrs. Kennedy after the assassination of her husband, 'mug shots' of criminals, fatal accidents, (129 Die in Jet-Plane Crash, 1962), gangster funerals, and race riots, (Red Race Riot, 1963). The image of an electric chair in Orange Disaster (1962-63) was taken from a press photograph and perhaps reveals more about the mass media than it does about capital punishment. By excluding all sentimental associations, it also dismisses interpretation and commitment. However, in Popism - The Warhol '60s (1980) Warhol reveals how persistently he worked to make his breakthrough although critics considered his work strange and even in 1964, after successful exhibitions, nobody wanted to pay high prices for paintings based on comics.

Warhol's New York City art studio, 'the Factory', became a legendary hangout for artist, celebrities, and social dropouts. Among its glittering guests were Bob Dylan, Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev, Mia Farrow, John Lennon, and its 'regulars' included Edie Sedgwick, Viva, and Lou Reed. The location of the studio was in the middle of the action - 47th Street and Third Avenue. Demonstrators could be seen on their way to the UN, the prime minister of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchec went by, and the Pope rode by once on his way to St Patrick's Cathedral.

In 1963 Warhol went into filmmaking, producing more than 80 films. Typical examples of his early work are SLEEP (1963), in which the camera remains fixed on a man sleeping for the duration of eight hours, and EMPIRE (1965), which consists of seemingly endless shot of the Empire State Building. In TUB GIRLS, the girls had to take baths with other people in tubs. His films, exhibited in art theatres, helped accelerate the trend toward legitimising explicit sex on the American screen.

Usually Warhol utilised transvestites, homosexuals, and people who happened to visit 'the Factory' as actors in his films. Several of his actors emerged as 'superstars' of the underground, with such pseudonyms as Viva, Ultra Violet, Mario Montez, Candy Darling, and Ingrid Superstar.

Warhol's first films were plot less and silent, loosely structured productions that fall somewhere between documentary and fiction. Later films were technically more complex. Warhol used a script although much of the dialogue was improvised and the films were more or less without plot as seen in CHELSEA GIRLS (1966). For a while he used drag queens in his movies, "because the real girls... couldn't seem to get excited about anything." According to Warhol, he never particularly wanted to make simple sex movies, but attempted to show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. Warhol's gradual withdrawal from film production coincided with his near fatal shooting in 1968 by a female 'factory' reject connected with an anti-male hate group. During Warhol's recovery the film projects were continued by Paul Morrisey.

In 1965 Warhol started to sponsor the rock group Velvet Underground, and invited them to perform at the showing of his film series, Cinematique Uptight. The group was originally formed by Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen 'Moe Tucker' and Warhol's close friend Nico (Christa Päffgen). THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO appeared in 1967. The album includes Reed's Heroin and Warhol's cover illustration, a peel able banana.

"I had known Andy Warhol for 23 years at the time of his death, and it came as surprise to me to learn that he was a devout Catholic - a surprise that, when considered, is not a surprise but somehow appropriate."
(William S. Burroughs, in Andy Warhol by Mike Wrenn)

In 1969 Warhol founded the Interview magazine - first called inter/VIEW - and remained a powerful pop culture figure into 1980s. In the 1970s Warhol turned to portrait painting of celebrities - but his activities had already expanded beyond mere art making: he was at the heart of a corporation that produced films, books, plays, and television. Bob Colacello, the editor of Interview left the magazine in 1983 and later portrayed Warhol in his book Holy Terror (1990). Colacello saw Warhol as an eccentric millionaire, gossiper, sharp businessman, shopper, and "a closet control freak, who deviously pretended he didn't know what was going on..." Warhol died suddenly in 1987, following a routine gallbladder operation. Warhol's diary, from 1976 to 1987, was published posthumously in 1989. The book became a bestseller and contains gossip and reminiscences of his acquaintances. In the entries he carefully records his spending, from phone calls to nickels for bag-ladies, and also endlessly lists celebrities he met at parties and other places: "I went to Ashton Hawkins's dinner at 17 East 89th Street, my old neighbourhood, so it made me feel funny. The real howdy-doody heavy duties were there - Brooke Astor, Laurance Rockefeller, Alice Arlen. And Mike Nichols's hair, I don't think it's fake, it looks so great, so really great..." Nobody says anything interesting.

"In the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes."

Warhol's works have engendered much debate - proving that they are not as simple as they first appear to be. Warhol himself did not want to explain his pictures, or merely considered them business art. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) he wrote: "Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called 'art' or whatever it's called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business in the most fascinating kind of art."

For further reading: Famous For 15 Minutes by Ultra Violet (1989); The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett (1989); The Life and Death of Andy Warhol by Victor Bockris (1989); Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up by Bob Colacello (1990); Andy Warhol by Mike Wren (1991); I Shot Andy Warhol by Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan (1996); The Life and Works of Andy Warhol by Trewin Copplestone (1996) - See also: Marshall McLuhan - Nico - Christa Päffgen (1938-1988), born in Köln. She worked as a model, and had a small role in 1959 in Fellini's film La Dolce Vita. In the mid-Sixties she got into music through friendship with Rolling Stone Brian Jones and manager Andrew Loog Oldham. In New York she met Andy Warhol and appeared in his film Chelsea Girls. Nico left Velvet Underground after one record and made solo debut in 1968. Next years she spent in Paris and made a version of the Door's The End, which was the name of her solo return. In the late Seventies and early Eighties Nico performed in clubs, and released in 1981 Drama of Exile. Leading a vagabond life and addicted to heroin, Nico floated from country to country, and spent her last years in Manchester, England. On July 17, 1988, she had an accident on her bicycle in Ibiza, Spain. She was misdiagnosed as having sunstroke and she died of a cerebral haemorrhage. - Nico had a son with French actor Alain Delon. Among her friends were Jim Morrison, John Cale, and Brian Eno. - Chelsea Girl (1968), The Marble Index (1969), Desert Shore (1971), June 1 (1974), The End (1974), Drama of Exile (1981), Do or Die! Nico in Europe (1983), Camera Obscura (1985), The Peel Sessions (1988).

Films as a director and producer:

• KISS, 1963
• EAT, 1963
• SLEEP, 1963
• HAIRCUT, 1963
• TARZAN AND JANE REGAINED ... SORT OF, 1964
• DANCE MOVIE/ROLLER SKATE, 1964
• BLOW JOB, 1964
• BATMAN DRACULA, 1964
• SALOME AND DELILAH, 1964
• SOAP OPERA, 1964 (co-dir.)
• COUCH 1964
• 13 MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, 1964
• HARLOT, 1964
• THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO, 1965
• EMPIRE, 1965
• POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, 1965
• SCREEN TEST, 1965
• VINYL, 1965
• BEAUTY #2, 1965
• HORSE, 1965
• MY HUSTLER, 1965
• CAMP, 1965
• AFTERNOON, 1965
• SUICIDE, 1965
• DRUNK, 1965
• BITCH, 1965
• PRISON, 1965
• SPACE, 1965
• THE CLOSET, 1965
• HENRY GELDZAHLER, 1965
• TAYLOR MEAD'S ASS, 1965
• FACE, 1966
• OUTER AND INNER SPACE, 1966
• THE 14-YEAR OLD GIRL/HEDY/HEDY THE SHOPLIFTER, 1966
• MORE MILK YVETTE/LANA TURNER, 1966
• THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO, 1966
• KITCHEN, 1966
• LUPE, 1966
• THE CHELSEA GIRLS, 1966
• I'M A MAN, 1967
• BIKE BOY, 1967
• NUDE RESTAURANT, 1967
• ****/FOUR STARS/24-HOUR MOVIE, 1967
• THE LOVES OF ONDINE, 1968
• FLESH, 1968 (producer)
• LONESOME COWBOYS, 1968
• BLUE MOVIE/FUCK, 1969
• TRASH, 1970 (producer)
• HEAT, 1972 (producer)
• WOMEN IN REVOLT, 1972 (co.dir. with Paul Morrisey)
• L'AMOUR, 1973 8co.dir. and co-script with Morrisey)
• ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN/FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN, 1974 (producer)
• ANDY WARHOL'S DRACULA/BLOOD FOR DRACULA, 1974 (producer)
• UNDERGROUND AND EMIGRANTS, 1976 (actor)
• ANDY WARHOL'S BAD, 1977 (producer)
• AN UNMARRIED WOMAN, 1978 (art collab.)
• COCAINE COWBOYS, 1979 (actor)
• THE LOOK, 1985 (actor)
• VAMP, 1986 (contrib. art)
• SUPERSTAR: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ANDY WARHOL, 1991 (documentary)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL: FROM A TO B & BACK AGAIN, (1975)
KISS, (1963)