Isaac Bleaman
Adrian Chapman
History – Period 5
11/9/02
Mmmm, Mmmm Good!
Andy Warhol was one of the greatest, most influential popular artists of our era. His art, called “pop art”, displays ordinary, everyday icons in an artistic form. The first pop artists tried to bring the real world into their art by painting and sculpting common objects. Pop artists are different than other artists because ordinary people can relate to the art they create. Andy Warhol became famous by painting realistic paintings of famous people and ordinary things that everybody knew about.
Andy Warhol was an important individual in history because of his artistic works, like the ever-popular Campbell’s Soup can and the Coca-Cola bottle. At first, many people thought of his paintings as “puzzling” and “weird” but soon grew to be amused by them, while others hated them. Eventually, after his work became trendy, he started making money and people loved him, causing him to become an important figure in society.
Andy Warhol was already “well off” being an illustrator for many newspapers and magazine by early-1960’s. However, it was fame that he craved more than anything else. He desired to become a serious artist, not for the money, but for the fame, and the money that comes with fame. The earliest pop artists wanted their art to be like the real world and at first people often rejected his drawings of Coca-cola bottles and cartoon characters. He was told that his pictures were similar to that of many other artists. So, in a desperate attempt to get a good idea he turned to his good friend Muriel Latow for advice. He paid her fifty dollars for her ideas. She told him to paint what he loved (like money) and things that were so familiar that nobody noticed them anymore like “Campbell’s Soup”, one of his most famous paintings.
With these ideas, he was on his way to fame. As his fame and fortune grew and grew, he began working in “The Factory” in the year of 1963. He created his most famous works in the factory, and his fame grew even more. Eventually he started to produce and/or direst movies and films, such as “The Chelsea Girls”, “Sleep”, and “Empire”. In “Empire” for example, the empire state building is simply shown for six hours, for which he won an award because it was shocking and controversial (the common people hated it).
His fame got the better of himself. After a woman, Valerie Solanas, asked him to produce a play she wrote and after he didn’t pay attention to her, she shot him in the chest. He survived, but he never felt the same way again. While many people considered his works trivial, others considered it to be taken seriously.
Nevertheless, his work was very influential on the work of other artists, and brought people into the world of pop art. Pop culture would never have been the same without the achievements of Warhol. He will forever be inscribed in the history of art and the history of America.
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