1928–1987
Andy Warhol
Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images. He drew widely from popular culture and everyday subject matter in his most famous works: his 32 Campbell's soup cans, Brillo pad box sculptures, and portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, for example. Rejecting the dominant painting and sculpting modes of his day, Warhol embraced silk-screen printmaking to achieve his characteristic hard edges and flat areas of color. The artist mentored Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and continues to influence contemporary art around the world: His provocative successors include Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons. Warhol has been the subject of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou, among other institutions. His works have sold for upwards of $100 million at auction.
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Biography
Cultural icon and father of Pop Art, Andy Warhol is one of the most famous artists of the 20th century. Known as much for his life as his art, everything about Andy Warhol screams celebrity culture and mass consumerism.
From his beginnings as a student of commercial art to his years as a commercial illustrator, it was always clear that Warhol’s interest lied in mass culture. A true reporter of his time, the artist never shied away from capturing the reality of the American Dream, from the glitz of Hollywood to the tragedies permeating everyday life. From his Deaths and Disaster series to canned soup, from Mickey Mouse to Ronald Reagan, Warhol’s art opened the door to the encounter of high and low, pushing the boundaries of what could be considered art. A prolific artist, producing print after print at his Factory, Warhol also pioneered a serial approach to artmaking that celebrated the art object as a commercial commodity.
Inspired by the French graffiti artist, Blek le Rat (real name Xavier Prou), Banksy’s art is both simple and evocative, poking fun through their satirical content. Banksy is well-known for using public buildings to stage his works, but it is his infamous stunts have further cemented him as a household name.
Where it Started
While Warhol’s journey to fame did not happen overnight, the commercial and popular success that his work enjoys has never stopped. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the artist began to experiment with what came to define his unique approach to artmaking: silk-screening. Silk-screening allowed Warhol to mimic the simplified language of advertisement, defined by bold outlines and flat colour blocks, and to repeat the same image many times across canvases and paper.
It was only in 1962, however, that it all came together for the artist. While a series of exhibitions in New York in the 1950s had already paved the way for his success, 1962 marked the year the artist began working on two of his most popular body of works: the Campbell's Soup Can series and the Marilyn Monroe series. The Campbell’s Soup Can series consisted of 32 canvases created through screen printing and directly challenged the dominance of Abstract Expressionism at the time. Countering prevalent notions of originality and authorship, Warhol promoted the use of processes of mechanical reproduction in art and the distancing of the hand of the artist. Equally, if not more recognisable, Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych immortalised the young American actress through 50 repeated portraits drawn from a press image of the actress from the film Niagara. The painting was completed by Warhol in the weeks following Monroe’s tragic death and commemorated the actress at the height of her career.
Warhol would return to these subjects many times, creating numerous paintings and editions. An iteration of the Marilyn series, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), sold for US$ 195 million at Christie’s New York, became the most expensive piece of 20th-century art ever sold.
Influences
The long lasting influences of Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp is present in Warhol’s work that both strives to shock and make use of everyday objects in the realm of fine art. Warhol’s cardboard Brillo boxes from 1964 and 1968 are very closely aligned to Duchamp’s concept of the ‘readymade’. The two artists also shared an interest in cross-dressing and photography. In 2010 the Andy Warhol Museum produced an exhibition that acknowledged the relationship between the two artists titled, ‘Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol’.
Unsurprisingly then, Warhol was also inspired by the Neo Dada group, which included the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who prided themselves in working within the gap between art and life. With his tongue in cheek subjects and brightly coloured silk screens Warhol sought to differentiate himself from the sombre formalism of Abstract Expressionism which had come to dominate the American post-war art world, proclaiming that, 'the Pop artists [made] images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognise in a split second…all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.'
Warhol's Personal Life
Many of Warhol’s works throughout his career point to the artist’s sexuality as a gay man, despite the criminalisation of homosexuality at the time in the United States. Warhol’s sexuality has remained a topic that is spoken little about in relation to his life and work, a reminder of the lasting effects of the homophobia that characterised the socio-political landscape of mid-late 20th-century America. In the 1950s Warhol produced sketchbooks of drawings of the male form, including studies of feet, torsos and genitalia, entitled, Boy Portraits. His films from the 1960s were also overlain with references to homosexual desire and sexual escapades. The artists Sex Parts and Torso series from the 1970s also engaged with the male (and female) nude form.
After losing the lease on his Silver Factory in 1967, Warhol was famously shot in 1968 in his studio by the writer Valerie Solanas, who featured in his film I, a Man (1967). The shooting was nearly fatal and had a profound effect on the rest of the artist’s life and output, marking a transition from Warhol’s all-encompassing, experimental art practice, to one more subdued.
Current Market
One of the great misconceptions of Andy Warhol's print market is that his prolific production should put prospective buyers off. Actually, the opposite is true. The fact that his graphics depict a multitude of subjects, were produced in large editions, and are available in a wide range of prices, affords a diverse group of collectors an opportunity to own his work.
Paintings and prints by Warhol boomed in 2022; in fact, 2022 marked an exceptional year for the Pop Art market in its entirety. 35 years after his death, Warhol continues to break records: since the record-breaking sale—for $195 million—of Shot Sage Blue Marilyn in May 2022, Marilyn prints have been steadily increasing in value.
Back in 2020, when other artists’ markets such as Banksy's were exploding, Warhol’s dipped. But it has proved only temporary. Always ahead of his time, series such as Endangered Species, Ladies & Gentlemen and Ads were arguably, until recently, under-appreciated. As works such as these began to receive overdue recognition, the growth in average sale price across Warhol’s portfolio rose exponentially over 2022. On the whole, Warhol's prints are steadily increasing in value as we enter 2023. Prints by the King of Pop represent some of the most desirable opportunities to invest in a thriving Pop-Art market.
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