The Creativity of Andy Warhol

American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement Andy Warhol came into the world as Andrew Warhola Jr. on August 6, 1928. His artistic artworks explored the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture. His work spanned various different media among them painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture.

Warhol began exhibiting his artwork in art galleries in the late 1950s. The Factory, his New York City art studio became a well-known and favored gathering place for intellectuals, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. Warhol has written many books among them “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” and “Popism: The Warhol Sixties”. Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 in New York City at the age of 58.

You can see his artwork on display at The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The museum has an extensive permanent collection of art and archives and is the largest museum dedicated to a single artist in the US.

Some of the Most Famous Artworks

Between November 1961 and April 1962, Warhol created Campbell's Soup Cans. On thirty-two canvases he painted a Campbell's Soup can. One can of each of the soups canned by Campbell at this time. He created them by the screen printing method. They represent iconography from popular culture and have become part of the pop art trend. His first display of Campbell's Soup Cans opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, California. It was at this show that pop art made its premiere on the West Coast.

Marilyn Diptych silkscreen artwork was created in 1962. It became one of Warhol's most well-known depictions of the Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe. This artwork consists of fifty images of Monroe based on a particular promotional shot taken from the 1953 film “Niagara”. The prints of Monroe were owned and distributed by her film company. Warhol finished this artwork only a few weeks after Monroe died in August 1962. This artwork was created using the silk-screening process with twenty-five photos on the left colored and twenty-five photos on the right black and white. The Marilyn Diptych artwork is in the Tate collection. Tate is an institution that houses four art galleries in the UK's national collection of British art, international modern, and contemporary art.

In 1964 Warhol created The Shot Marilyns. This artwork is comprised of four canvases each with a painting of Marilyn Monroe shot in the forehead by a single bullet. The artists created five distinctly colored photos of Marilyn with backgrounds in red, orange, light blue, sage blue, and turquoise. This work of art he kept at The Factory his Manhattan studio. When a friend of Factory photographer Billy Name, Dorothy Podber saw the freshly painted paintings pile up one against the other at the studio she asked Warhol if she could shoot them. He assumed she meant to photograph them. Instead, Podber took a little handgun and fired a shot into the stack of Marilyn paintings. Thus the artwork The Shot Marilyns.

In 1962 Warhol finished Coca-Cola 3 as part of a larger series of Coca-Cola paintings. This painting is regarded as a foundational work of the pop art movement. The artwork depicts a 6-foot-tall black-and-white painting of a vintage Coca-Cola bottle.

Warhol created Self-Portrait in 1966 in a grid of colorful, repetitive silk-screened portraits. This artwork became one of his defining styles. He combined primary and secondary colors.

Dollar Signs were created in 1981. This artwork was comprised of one or more stylized dollar signs. He used numerous silkscreens and the series links art with money separating it from cash and expanding it to cartoon-like dimensions.