Andy Warhol: The Broad Gave Me My Own Nose

Andy Warhol, the father of American pop art whose notoriety came from his approach to art and his subjects. Warhol became known as a symbol for the counterculture movement of the 1960’s. He was an eclectic artist known for his paintings of American culture, movie stars, to political icons. Warhol’s interest in celebrities as well as media culture prompted him to re-examine everyday objects and access them on an artistic scale (Weekes). Andy was born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, 1928 to Czechoslovakian immigrants. As a boy, Warhol was awkwardly shy and did well in school but came down with a disease of the nervous system in the third grade (Colacello). The kids often teased Andy and called him “a little sissy” because he didn’t like sports

The portrait was of young male with his finger up his nostril and was called “The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I can Pick My Own Nose, which become a controversial success (Colacello). Andy graduated from college in 1949 with his degree in design and moved to New York City with his close friend Philip Pearlstein, who became a realist painter (Colacello). This was what Warhol referred to as his “cockroach period” that he never forgot. The time came when he was able to show his work to Carmel Snow, the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, when he opened his portfolio a cockroach came out and Carmel felt so sorry for him that she gave him the assignment (Colacello). Little by little Warhol obtained more commissions to work on and by the fifties he was gaining fame. Warhol didn’t like working alone and found assistants to paint the backgrounds, silkscreen, and ghost write at the proto-factory (Colacello). It was a consistent question if Andy’s commercial art and his pop art were original in his early blotted illustration and later silkscreen paintings (Colacello). Regardless of who worked with him, it was Andy Warhol who finished the work (Colacello). The big break came around 1955 when Geraldine Stutz, a fashion director paid Warhol, 50,000 a year to do weekly ads in the

His portrait of the Brillo box was an example of bringing everyday objects into an art form. He was successful at creating his own version of brand equity and used an imitator strategy that took on readymade symbols. Warhol used bright colors to convey different sensations and in the portrait of Marilyn Monroe, he used the controls to adjust colors (Douma). The technique was photo-stencils in screen-printing. Warhol used photographic images and prepared the screen using a photographic process, and then a variety of colored inks were printed using a rubber squeegee to press the paint on the painting through the screen (Douma). In Marilyn’s portraits the boundaries are blurred between art and popular culture that created a new style symbolizing the counterculture. The portraits of Marilyn were done after her death in August of 1962. Warhol used the publicity shot by Gene Korman for the film Niagara