FREE ESSAY ON ANDY WARHOL

ANDY WARHOL

ever before have I encountered more intriguing works of art than those 
done by Andy Warhol. I have been curious about his life ever since I saw 
his work in Milwaukee. I saw his famous work of the Campbell's Soup Can. 
By viewing this, one can tell he is not your average artist. I'm sure his 
life is full of interesting events that shaped him into who he was. As an 
artist myself, I would like to get to know the background of his life. I 
may then be able to appreciate his styles and understand why and how his 
works were created. His life is as interesting as his artistic 
masterpieces. 
Andrew Warhola (his original name) was born one of three sons of Czech 
immigrants, somewhere in Pennsylvania on either August 6, 1928 or on 
September 28, 1930 (the date on his birth certificate). His father died 
when Andy was at a very young age. Thus, it forced Andy into a deep 
depression containing lack of self confidence. Much of his young life has 
been kept secret. However, he did report being very shy and depressed 
because he never felt comfortable with his homosexuality. His childhood 
life may have been full of the torture that children threw at him for 
being the different person he was. He was able to attend college. After 
graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in pictorial design from 
Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, he went to New York City with 
Philip Pearlstein, who was a fellow student that later became a well-known 
realist painter. In 1960, Warhol finally began to paint in earnest and to 
view art seriously as a career. He began his career with commercial 
drawings of women's shoes. In 1961, an early manifestation was his Dick 
Tracy, an enlarged version of the comic strip that was placed in the 
window of Lord & Taylor's department store. He followed in his own 
footsteps to keep going in the ever-so-famous pop art track. Warhol's 
use of images are so close to the images themselves, thanks to the 
photographic silkscreen technique, which is a process of applying the same 
image over and over again without changing the original. In 1963, he began 
turning film into his next aesthetic. He was the recorder of the world 
around him. Warhol saw this world as populated by hustlers of various 
sorts, motivated largely by money and the goods it would buy. Later that 
next year, he started to experiment in underground film. In the late 70's 
he began to use sex and nudity to gain attention in his films. Whether 
this was moral or not; it did, however, work. The rest of his short life 
was spent visiting with celebrities and keeping up with the world's times. 
He tried to understand how the rest of the world saw things, but just 
never got there. Sadly, Warhol died of a heart failure on March 9, 1987, 
still wearing his famous blond hair wig. 
Andy's diaries are not actual written records of his day to day accounts, 
but they are audio recordings of his phone conversations to Pat Hackett 
every Monday through Friday (from Wednesday, November 24, 1976 to Tuesday, 
February 17, 1987, just weeks before his death). Warhol originally 
intended these daily records to be documentation of his minor business 
expenses. He was just audited and felt the need to be extra careful. In a 
word it was a diary. But whatever its broader objective, its narrow one, 
to satisfy tax auditors, was always on my mind (Warhol xvi). Later on, he 
felt the diaries were a great way to explain his everyday occurrences for 
more than a decade of his life. This view of his life from his eyes is 
probably the most balanced view ever given. He may have changed since the 
60's, but it is still the truest representation of Andy, himself. He never 
expressed the key happenings of his life; it's as if we, the readers, 
already knew them. He just usually mentions the quick everyday type things 
such as a cab ride to uptown New York.
The first major influence on Andy Warhol's life was the stepping stone of 
his artistic career, his enrollment in and completion of Carnegie 
Institute of Technology with a bachelor degree in pictorial design. After 
graduating he moved out to New York City, where his life blossomed. He 
lived for a couple of years with Philip Pearlstein, who he had met at 
school. Warhol, with his education centered around design, set out to 
begin his career on the right foot. He started doing drawings for 
advertisements in a women's shoe catalog. It may not have been much to 
brag about, but it was at least something he could learn and gain from the 
experience given to him. Andy may have acquired his use of media exploited 
images through his beginning attempts at commercialism. He knew what sold 
to society, whether he agreed with it or not. He continued on with 
simplified pop art and he made it famous. He is the person most people 
think about when pop art is mentioned. Through his advertising projects, 
he was conditioned to think only in glorification of people, products, and 
style. One of his popular works, the silkscreen of the Campbell's Soup 
Can, is an example of this. It is an image that everyone is familiar with, 
and it is so common that sometimes it is overlooked. Many times, Andy took 
something simple and glorified it. This is how he made his designing 
skills useful in promotion. One would compare Warhol to the pictorial 
hyper-realism of Norman Rockwell, and to the surrealism of Marcel Duchamp, 
and the radicalism of Jasper Johns (Sagan 1).
A second major influence in Andy Warhol's life is his participation in the 
underground film scene. It started in 1963, when he called himself the 
recorder of society around him (Moritz 590). He would find people for his 
movies in a club-type warehouse called Max's Kansas City. Every night, 
celebrities of art, fashion, music, and underground film-making crowds 
gathered in the back corners of Max's to try their chance at working with 
Warhol. In 1968, he was nearly killed by a woman who was in one of his 
short films. She shot him on the side of his chest, but fortunately he was 
not killed. He still continued to make films; such famous ones are Eat, 
Haircut, Sleep, Kiss, and Empire. He would make them boring on 
purpose to possibly prove a point. Again it was glorifying something 
thought of as being extremely pointless. In the late 70's he began to use 
sex and nudity, featuring films concerning sexual bondage. He may have 
been simply looking for a shock value content. Many artists work off shock 
value, it takes only the true to admit it and still continue with it.
The last and most important influence on Warhol was his mother, Julia 
Warhola. When Andy first arrived in New York, he would share apartments 
with friends and acquaintances. Eventually he could afford a place of his 
own. Then his mother suddenly arrived in town and moved in with him. Her 
reason was to look after him. She would constantly keep an eye out for a 
wife for Andy. Little did she know he was interested in the opposite sex 
for marriage. Andy appreciated his mother, and never wanted to explain how 
she had an impact on him. Maybe it was the fact that she meant well, and 
tried her hardest to take care of him. She lived with him on 89th Street 
and Lexington Avenue until 1971. By then, suffering from senility, she 
required constant care and Andy sent her back to Pittsburgh to be cared 
for by his two brothers, John and Paul. After suffering a stroke, she died 
in her nursing home in 1972. Andy did not except the fact too kindly. He 
would even go as far to say his mother was doing fine, when people would 
ask about her, even though she had already passed away. Andy stayed quiet 
and tried to hide himself from the rest of society. He would avoid 
emotional interaction as much as he could. He did this so he could shrink 
away from human touch (Moritz 591). A man who started his life shy and 
uncomfortable, blossomed into an outspoken artist, now finished his life 
with feelings even worse than the beginning of his life.
After extensive research I found that Andy had much more to his life than 
I had originally expected. He was involved in the classic rock band The 
Velvet Underground, with famous singer Lou Reed. He actually even designed 
a few of the album covers. Most people remember the self-entitled album 
with the picture of a banana on it. Directly to the left of the banana 
read the words peel me. If one would peel it, it would reveal the pink 
insides of a banana. Truly a work of Andy, I must say. Another thing I 
found was that Andy was not only homosexual, but he was omnisexual. It 
was rumored he had no problem with sex with anyone or anything. Men, 
women, animals, you name it, it was probably thought of. And last of all I 
found he was unusually kind and appreciative to others, especially the 
ones who worked for him. Pat Hackett, his editor, once said that she has 
never met a person who says thank you as much as Andy does. 
Not once have I been more informed on a person's life. In the beginning I 
thought I knew a lot about. This research on Andy Warhol definitely 
reinforced my positive view of him. It may have possibly enhanced my 
appreciation for him as well. I enjoyed the honesty of the entire diary. 
Nothing was hidden from the reader and I felt as informed as a good friend 
of his would feel. His life is an interesting one and I believe more 
people should try to investigate other lives of the unusual. It expands 
your own viewpoints to accept those of others. 
Many critics have different viewpoints on Warhol's autobiography. He was 
still appreciated by those who understood his ideas. But he had to have 
had some sense of history, or he wouldn't have left the diaries behind to 
try to explain everything to future generations (Plagens 1732). Some 
realize that the diaries are rather boring, but seem to see the true Andy 
come through in the entries. Despite their virtuoso triviality, their 
naive snobbery and their incredible length, the diaries are not without a 
certain charm (Amis 1732). Others saw the diaries as a simplistic record 
of events. His diaries are more or less just records of who went where 
and did what with whom, that anybody else who'd been along could have 
kept (Plagens 1732). It's too bad he didn't start the diaries earlier in 
his life, such as the 60's, when it would have been more interesting to 
know what he did and whom he was with, instead of waiting until 1976 to 
begin (Plagens 1732). Some even complained of the editing job done by Pat 
Hackett. One problem with the diaries is their postmodern polish, such as 
the casual proofreading and editing (Trebay 1732). The reason the editor 
didn't fit up to par was the mere fact she wanted it to sound how Andy 
explained the day. ...still the book is great social history with its 
lip-smacking tales of loveless, sexless marriages, its gimlet-eyed view of 
other people's success, and its rampant unclosetings (Trebay 1732). I, 
myself, found the book very entertaining and a great nonchalant look at 
the famous and their everyday lives. It may have been organized better and 
condensed a bit, but none-the-less it was still interesting and kept me 
reading. 
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