Andy Warhol Research Paper

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol was one of the most popular and prolific artists of the 1960’s and the rest of his time as an artist. He started out as a very successful magazine artist as well as an ad illustrator who then moved to become that influential artist of the 1960’s we have all seen. Most people think of Andy Warhol for his art but really Warhol dabbled in other forms such as filmmaking and performance art. His career spanned from the early 1940’s all the way through his death in the 1980’s and even beyond with his work still being viewed and replicated today. Warhol was born on August 6, 1928 to his parents, Julia and Andrej Warhola. The Warhola’s immigrated here from a village on the boarder of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They moved

He would through parties and actually enlist his friends to help hand color his artist books. This was some of the first displays of Warhol’s work in New York. (“Andy Warhol Bio”) In the Late 1950’s early 1960’s, he created his first pop painting that was based off of comics and ads, this was in 1961. He would base his art off of comic strips and newspaper clippings and he created works such as, Superman (1961). This is also when he began his work on the Campbell’s soup can project. Working on this project is when his celebrity status really began. His pop art later included ideas such as his Marilyn portraits and his screen prints of Mickey Mouse. This also included his works of the Campbell’s soup

This work consisted of 32 canvases each painted with a different soup can. In the gallery when first presented they were hung on the wall as a regular painting would, but then they were also placed on a shelf, as they would be in a grocery store. Each can was a different flavor of soup from Campbell’s catalog of soups. There really is no idea and no evidence if Warhol wanted them to be in a certain order or particular sequence. In a lot of versions you can see now they are in rows in the order in which they were released by Campbell Soup Company starting with tomato soup, which actually debuted in 1897. Irving Blum was running the Ferus Gallery in LA at the time and had ran into Warhol when he had only six of the thirty two canvases painted. They came to agreement that Blum would be the one to hold the summer exhibition to show them. It was his idea to present them on the shelf and presented this idea to Warhol who accepted by phone call. During the showing a lot of critics of the time were asking is this really art or is this just advertisement of a soup can? Other artists would ask questions and really didn’t appreciate it like Blum did. Looking at the paintings I feel that they were presented in such a way that they are art. They have a meaning behind them. These panting’s are not the lavish paintings we see in churches or even other paintings we see