Archive: Andy Warhol, Feb.22, 1987
deb...@comcast.net
FROM: The New York Times (February 23rd 1987) ~
By Douglas C. McGill
Andy Warhol, a founder of Pop Art whose paintings and prints of
Presidents, movie stars, soup cans and other icons of America made him
one of the most famous artists in the world, died yesterday. He was
believed to be 58 years old.
The artist died at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in
Manhattan, where he underwent gall bladder surgery Saturday. His
condition was stable after the operation, according to a hospital
spokeswoman, Ricki Glantz, but he had a heart attack in his sleep
around 5:30 A.M.
Though best known for his earliest works - including his silk-screen
image of a Campbell's soup can and a wood sculpture painted like a box
of Brillo pads - Mr. Warhol's career included successful forays into
photography, movie making, writing and magazine publishing.
He founded Interview magazine in 1969, and in recent years both he and
his work were increasingly in the public eye - on national magazine
covers, in society columns and in television advertisements for
computers, cars, cameras and liquors.
In all these endeavors, Mr. Warhol's keenest talents were for
attracting publicity, for uttering the unforgettable quote and for
finding the single visual image that would most shock and endure. That
his art could attract and maintain the public interest made him among
the most influential and widely emulated artists of his time.
Although himself shy and quiet, Mr. Warhol attracted dozens of
followers who were anything but quiet, and the combination of his
genius and their energy produced dozens of notorious events throughout
his career. In the mid-1960's, he sometimes sent a Warhol look alike
to
speak for him at lecture engagements, and his Manhattan studio, ''the
Factory,'' was a legendary hangout for other artists and hangers-on.
In 1968, however, a would-be follower shot and critically wounded Mr.
Warhol at the Factory. After more than a year of recuperation, Mr.
Warhol returned to his career, which he increasingly devoted to
documenting, with Polaroid pictures and large silk-screen prints,
political and entertainment figures. He started his magazine, and soon
became a fixture on the fashion and jet-set social scene.
In the 1980's, after a relatively quiet period in his career, Mr.
Warhol burst back onto the contemporary art scene as a mentor and
friend to young artists, including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and
Jean-Michel Basquiat. With Mr. Basquiat, Mr. Warhol collaborated on a
series of paintings in which he shunned mechanical reproduction
techniques and painted individual canvases for the first time since
the
early 1960's.
He never denied his obsession with art as a business and with getting
publicity; instead, he proclaimed them as philosophical tenets.
''Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,'' he
said
on one occasion. On another, he said: ''Art? That's a man's name.'' As
widely known as his art and his own image were, however, Mr. Warhol
himself was something of a cipher. He was uneasy while speaking about
himself. ''The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me
to
say and I'll repeat them after him,'' he once said.
Date of Birth Uncertain
The earliest facts of his life remain unclear. He was born somewhere
in
Pennsylvania in either 1928, 1929 or 1930, according to three known
versions of his life. (The most commonly accepted date is Aug. 6,
1928.) The son of immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia, his father a
coal miner - the family's name was Warhola -he attended the Carnegie
Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), from which
he
graduated with a degree in pictorial design in 1949.
He immediately set out for New York, where he changed his name to
Warhol and began a career as an illustrator and a commerical artist,
working for Tiffany's, Bonwit Teller's, Vogue, Glamour, The New York
Times and other magazines and department stores.
By the late 1950's, he was highly successful, having earned enough
money to move to a town house in Midtown, and having received numerous
professional prizes and awards. Despite his success, however, he
increasingly considered trying his hand at making paintings, and in
1960 he did so with a series of pictures based on comic strips,
including Superman and Dick Tracy, and on Coca-Cola bottles.
Success, however, was not immediate. Leo Castelli, the art dealer best
known for discovering the artists Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg,
saw Mr. Warhol's paintings but declined to show his work, since Roy
Lichtenstein, who also painted pictures taken from comic strips, was
already represented by the gallery. Ivan Karp, a talent scout for
Castelli who discovered Mr. Warhol, tried to help him find a New York
gallery that would show his work, with no success.
The Birth of a Movement
In 1962, the dam broke, with Mr. Warhol's first exhibition of the
Campbell's soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and his show
of other works at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Other Pop
artists, including Mr. Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Tom
Wesselman
also began to achieve prominence around the country at the time, and
the movement was born.
Though some of Mr. Warhol's first Pop Art paintings had drips on
them -
evidence that the painter's hand had left its mark on the work - by
1963 Mr. Warhol had dispensed with the brush altogether. Instead, he
turned to exclusively hard-edged images made in the medium of
silk-screen print, which made a depersonalized image that became Mr.
Warhol's trademark.
''Painting a soup can is not in itself a radical act,'' the critic
Robert Hughes wrote in 1971. ''But what was radical in Warhol was that
he adapted the means of production of soup cans to the way he produced
paintings, turning them out en masse - consumer art mimicking the the
process as well as the look of consumer culture.''
In 1964 Mr. Warhol was taken on by the Castelli Gallery, which
remained
his art dealer until his death. His experimentation with underground
films began around that time - an interest that culminated in
widespread notoriety if not overwhelming box office acclaim.
''Eat,'' a 45-minute film, showed the artist Robert Indiana eating a
mushroom. ''Haircut'' showed a Warhol groupie having his hair cut over
a span of 33 minutes, and another, ''Poor Little Rich Girl,'' was
filmed out of focus and showed Edie Sedgwick, a Warhol follower who
became a celebrity on the New York social circuit, talking about
herself.
In the 1970's, recuperated from his near fatal gunshot wound, Mr.
Warhol settled down to a sustained creative period in which his fame
as
a society figure leveled off, but his output, if anything, increased.
Working most often in silk-screen prints, he made series of pictures
of
political and Hollywood celebrities, including Mao, Liza Minelli,
Jimmy
Carter and Russell Banks.
In 1975, he published ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and
Back Again),'' a collection of statements and epigrams that elucidated
his contrary views on art.
In his glancing and elliptical style, Mr. Warhol wrote about subjects
ranging from art to money and sex. ''Checks aren't money,'' he wrote
in
one section of the book. In another, he said: ''Fantasy love is much
better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most
exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.''
In the 1980's, Mr. Warhol became more active in commissioned art
projects and a variety of other commercial activties. In 1983, he made
a series of prints - based on animals of endangered species - that was
first shown at the American Museum of Natural History.
A Near Exception
Although some of his later art projects seemed to diverge from his
calculating approach and to be motivated in part by social concern,
Mr.
Warhol generally avoided any such suggestion. He came closest to
making
an exception in 1985, when he exhibited a group of prints of clowns,
robots, monkeys and other images he made for children at the Newport
(R.I.) Art Museum in 1985.
''It's just that the show's for children,'' he told a reporter at the
time. ''I wanted it arranged for them. The Newport Museum agreed to
hang all of my children's pictures at levels where only kids could
really see them.''
After the news of his death was publicized yesterday, artists,
celebrities and politicians who knew Mr. Warhol spoke of his influence
on culture, and on their lives.
''He had this wry, sardonic knack for dismissing history and putting
his finger on public taste, which to me was evidence of living in the
present,'' said the sculptor George Segal. ''Every generation of
artists has the huge problem of finding their own language and talking
about their own experience. He was out front with several others of
his
generation in pinning down how it was to live in the 60's, 70's and
80's.''
Leo Castelli, Mr. Warhol's dealer of 23 years, said Mr. Warhol, more
than practically any artist of the last two decades, seemed to have a
continuing and strong influence on today's emerging artists. ''Of all
the painters of his generation he's still the one most influential on
the younger artists - a real guru,'' Mr. Castelli said.
Martha Graham, the dancer and choreographer, recalled her first
meeting
with Warhol. ''When I first met Andy, he confided to me that he was
born in Pittsburgh as I was, and that when he first saw me dance
'Appalachian Spring' it touched him deeply. He touched me deeply as
well. He was a gifted, strange maverick who crossed my life with great
generosity. His last act was the gift of three portraits [of Miss
Graham] he donated to my company to help my company meet its financial
needs.''
In his book, ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,'' the artist wrote a
short chap=ter entitled ''Death'' that consisted almost entirely of
these words: ''I'm so sorry to hear about it. I just thought that
things were magic and that it would never happen.''
Dr. Elliot M. Gross, the Chief Medical Examiner for New York City,
said
an autopsy on Mr. Warhol would be conducted today. Dr. Gross explained
that deaths occurring during surgery or shortly afterward are
considered deaths of an ''unusual manner.''
''It was an unexplained death of a relatively young person in
apparently good health,'' he said.
Mr. Warhol is survived by two brothers, John Warhola and Paul Warhola,
both of Pittsburgh.
CORRECTION-DATE: March 24, 1987, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition
CORRECTION:
The obituary of Andy Warhol on Feb. 23 listed his earliest major
successes incompletely. His first one-man show in New York, important
to his early renown as a Pop artist, took place in November 1962 at
the
Stable Gallery.