Warhol Post Shooting

Warhol’s factory was a veritable hangout for any and all kinds of people, and the manner of company Warhol chose to keep changed drastically as time went on. In the beginning he would have all manner of prostitutes, junkies, transvestites and basically any one else who wanted to see what was going on.  It went on like this until a woman made an attempt on Warhol’s life. Valerie Solanas a common face at the factory but a bit mentally unstable attempted to take his life. She wrote a script for a movie that she wanted Warhol to produce called S.C.U.M Manifesto, SCUM standing for the Society For Cutting Up Men. Warhol never actually intended on producing this, but led Valerie to believe that he would. Eventually Valerie gave up hope that her script would be made into a film and when she asked for it back Warhol claimed he’d lost it. Fed up — Valerie entered the factory with a loaded gun and shot Warhol twice as well as curator and friend Mario Amaya once. Miraculously Warhol survived, but had a deep-rooted fear of hospitals, which would be a key factor in his death later on.  

Andy claimed that living life was more like watching TV than watching TV because when you watch TV they make the emptions look so real while in real life its almost like everything is happening to someone else and your just watching from above (Stiles).  Despite Warhol’s immense popularity his shooting was for the most part unnoticed due to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy a couple days later. Andy’s life certainly quieted down after the shooting. Similar to the American government it takes a tragedy before we work to prevent one, and the factory scene was for a time dead. Warhol never entirely emotionally recovered from his near death experience, and his filmmaking career all but ended.

Andy may have been done with the drug addicts, hookers, and transvestites he liked to surround himself with, but by no means was he done with his art work. In fact this was when his portrait art picked up tenfold, now instead of the underbelly of society Warhol began surrounding himself with the rich and famous. Warhol began creating portraits of celebrities such as Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Liza Minnelli, and one of his most famous paintings was that of the leader of China Mao Zedong. This painting went on to become a world famous image. Andy was thought by all to be more of an observer than an actual partygoer. “I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked. It's not just that it's part of my image not to tell everything, it's just that I forget what I said the day before, and I have to make it all up over again” (Hou). Warhol was honestly thought to be crazy by most of his companions, but despite many deficiencies and diseases Warhol was an absolute genius when it came to three things, business, art, and manipulation.

Andy liked to surround himself with up and coming artists, and he really helped a lot of them get their start. One of the most compelling in his posse of talent was Jean Michel Basquiat. Basquiat began his career as a graphite artist and soon enough joined the Neo-Expressionist art movement. Warhol discovered him early and they became rather close. In the documentary depicting Basquiat’s life Warhol plays an essential role in being the one to spring board Basquiat to the top of the food chain, “Wanna buy some ignorant art,” is the first line Basquiat says to Warhol in the documentary, and Warhol buys every piece he was shown. When Basquiat hears about Warhol’s death toward the end of the movie he becomes deeply depressed and begins a downward spiral toward an inevitably suicide by drug overdose.

In 1987 Andy Warhol died due to complications following gallbladder surgery. Many believe the complications were caused by medical malpractice The New York Hospital was even sued by Warhol’s estate for a wrongful death suit. The primary argument was that Warhol was pumped with twice the necessary fluids and left completely unattended. The fluids caused Warhol to slip into a coma and eventually his heart failed. As far as the fluids go, Warhol weighed 22 pounds more in autopsy than he did in life. He was anemic and malnourished yet at check in the doctor wrote that he was perfectly healthy, and he was given painkillers which even further reduced his heart rate increasing the risk of heart failure. Warhol had avoided hospitals like the plague and loan behold, ‘twas his worst fear that was his end.

Stiles, Kristine; Peter Howard Selz (1996). "Warhol in His Own Words". Theories and

documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artists' writings. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 345.

The Andy Warhol Foundation. The Warhol:. 2011. Web. 27 Sept. 2011.

<http://www.warhol.org/default.aspx>.

Rodley, Chris, dir. Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture. Prod. World of Wonder. 2 May

2002. Television.

Hou, Herman. "Andy Warhol - Biography." The Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Internet Movie Database. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0912238/bio>.

Moffat, Charles. "Andy Warhol - The Prince of Pop Art - The Art History Archive."

The Art History Archive - Art Resources for Students and Academics. The Art History Archive, Nov. 2007. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. <http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/popart/Andy-Warhol.html>.

Sullivan, Ronald. "Care Faulted In the Death Of Warhol - New York Times." Editorial.

The New York Times 5 Dec. 1991. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/05/nyregion/care-faulted-in-the-death-of-warhol.html>.

Basquiat (1996). Dir. Julian Schnabel. Perf. Jefferey Write, Michael Wincott and David

Bowie. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 15 Nov. 2011. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115632/>.

      Andy Warhol was one of the greatest pop artists of the twentieth century, and he both created and mimicked hundreds of incredible artistic pieces.  Some of his most known pieces are the “Campbell Soup Can” and his screen prints. Repetition was the key with almost all of Warhol’s work as he painted at least thirty-two soup cans all of varying flavors only because he had it for lunch each day, “…he once showed a close friend two paintings of a Coke bottle, one done with abstract flourishes, the other "just a stark, outlined Coke bottle in black and white." He let his friend decide between the two… Forget the artsy details, go with the commercial art clarity” (Kennicott). A lot of Warhol’s work wasn’t even original, and it is partially due to him that copyright laws are as strict as they are today.  In Warhol’s prints of celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe, he printed the same image over and over again and each time it came out a little different as every one had a little flaw in some way. The Elvis print series were done over one another repeatedly in a haphazard way along a wall with one to three Elvis prints on each canvas. Warhol was mimicking the idea of mass production in America with his work as he was taking people and multiplying them so everybody could have an artistic piece.

            Warhol’s portrait art is another example of his love for repetition. He would do three paintings of someone and they would take their favorite home and Warhol would keep the others. He was adamant about the sizes though, they all had to be exactly the same because one day he intended to have them lined up in a gallery lining up perfectly.

           For a while Warhol created exceptionally gruesome screen prints by using newspaper stories of car accidents and suicides as a base.  Warhol begin these pictures around the time he was finishing with the Marilyn Monroe series and claimed to have realized he’d been doing death all along. One observer even claimed that he had managed to defuse the electric chair, as in remove the fear factor from America. Warhol took a photograph of an electric chair and did several prints of it all in different colors, which inadvertently removed the anxiety behind this American icon.

            Warhol was obsessed with the idea of stardom; in fact it was he who coined the phrase “In the future, everyone in the world will be famous for fifteen minutes” or better known today as fifteen minutes of fame. (Rodley) While being extremely shy Warhol still strived for his own entrance into stardom, and clearly he managed to achieve it (all things considered). Andy Warhol would have you think he was a fool and yet its almost self evident that he was absolutely brilliant, “…it wasn't Warhol's eccentricities that made him truly fabulous; it was his penchant for paying attention to and learning from everything around him” (Heppermann). Warhol used his brilliance to not only advance his own social standing, but also to use those who were around him. Warhol not only sought stardom for himself but also loved to witness others who were in such a position. When he was younger he would send letters to his favorite stars, and one of his favorite child actors, Shirley Temple, sent him an autographed photo and so thus started his collection of famous faces (Rodley). One week following Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, Warhol began pumping out the Monroe prints like clockwork. 

            Warhol’s films were brought about by a desire to help others gain their fifteen minutes of fame. His films had absolutely no plot and he didn’t even tend to move the camera from its initial position. He did hundreds of films and some of them weren’t even of moving objects  — one several hour video simply of the Empire State Building. This would be played in the background at parties and people would think it was a still image until after six hours the lights would turn on and it would be a still image of that instead. Warhol also liked to sit friends in front of the camera and have them stare endlessly into it until their façade broke and you can see what they were really like when they’re bored, and that’s what he wanted to see, the true face of society.