Designer of the Month: Andy Warhol

Week 4: silkscreening and celebrity

It's great to buy friends. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a lot of money and attracting people with it. Look who you're attracting: EVERYBODY![1]

 Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 6' 11 1/4" x 57" (211.4 x 144.7 cm). Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2012 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In August of 1962, Andy Warhol had just begun to become famous. His soup can paintings were a hit, but the rubber-stamp method that he'd been using to create multiples of images suddenly seemed a little too homemade for Warhol.[2] He had a very specific aesthetic in mind, something more assembly-line and factory-made - an effect he found through silkscreening. As Warhol explains about this process:

With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple - quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face - the first Marilyns.[3]

Silkscreening was a method of creation that would come to dominate Warhol's work for some time. Unlike painting, which was labor-intensive, or rubber-stamp printing, which was too crude, silkscreening allowed Warhol to create a multiple images with very little effort at an incredibly fast pace. Also significant was the fact that the images Warhol was using for his silkscreens were based on already mass-produced photographs. His Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), for instance, is based on a 1953 publicity still for the movie Niagara - a photograph that would have been recognizable by millions.[4]

Installation of Andy Warhol's Jackie series and related source material. Andy Warhol, Jackie, 1964. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen. Each image:  20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm.). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Some people spend their whole lives thinking about one particular famous person. They pick one person who's famous, and they dwell on him or her. They devote almost their entire consciousness to thinking about this one person they've never even met, or maybe met once. If you ask any famous person about the kind of mail they get, you'll find that almost every one of them has at least one person who's obsessed with them and writes them constantly. It feels strange to think that someone is spending their whole time thinking about you.[5]

Through the process of silkscrening, Warhol co-opted the popular image of celebrity icons into the realm of the contemporary commodity through the act of machine-like repetition.[6] But it was exactly this repetition, his use of the same image over and over again, that served to draw attention to their differences.[7] "A magical transformation occurs in these works, generated by a factory-style production line," explains curator Suhanya Raffel, "to produce masses of seductive, glossy and beautiful celebrity portraits."[8] It was Warhol's obsession with celebrity - both the celebrity of others as well as himself - that would serve as an enduring theme throughout his life and career and lead to some of his most iconic works.

Andy Warhol, Silver Liz [Ferus Type], 1963. Silkscreen ink, acrylic, and spray paint on linen, 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm.). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product. But then they always say that they're helping you, and that's true too, but still, if people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven't figured it out fully yet.[9] 

While Warhol's celebrity prints were a great success, it was his portraits that truly earned him both fame and fortune. Beginning in 1963 and continuing throughout his life, Warhol devoted a substantial part of his career to producing portraits of acquaintances - everyone from collectors, artists and dealers to the truly rich and famous celebrity set.[10] Not only do these collective portraits form a coherent account of his experiments in a variety of media, from photography to painting and silkscreen, but they also provide an incredible account of the sheer number and variety of people who came to be associated with him.[11] As Bob Colacello, who worked as managing editor of Warhol's magazine, Interview, recalls of the process for creating these celebrity portraits:

During the twelve years I worked at the Factory, Andy must have painted close to a thousand portraits of socialites, tycoons, politicians, artists, art dealers, fashion designers, athletes, rock stars and anyone else who was willing to pay US$25 000 for a 40-inch-square silkscreen-and-acrylic-on-canvas picture of themselves. Most of the New York art world, which during the 1970s was infatuated with Conceptual Art and leftwing causes, reacted to Andy's commissioned portrait work with outrage and jealousy, calling it embarrassing, reactionary, frivolous and commercial beyond critical redemption.[12]

It's not hard to imagine that this was precisely the reaction that Warhol was going for.


[1] Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1928), 132.

[2] Andy Warhol, "1960-1963," POPism: The Warhol '60s, ed. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 22.

[3] Ibid., 22.

[4] The Museum of Modern Art online, "The Collection," excerpt from MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 241, http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79737, (accessed August 22, 2012).

[5] Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1928), 84.

[6] Suhanya Raffel, "Pop As Attitude, " from Andy Warhol, published in conjunction with the Queensland Art Gallery and The Andy Warhol Museum, (Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Art Gallery, 2007), 24.

[7]  Ibid., 25.

[8] Ibid., 25.

[9] Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1928), 78.

[10] Riva Castleman, "The Prints of Andy Warhol," from The Prints of Andy Warhol,  (New York: the Museum of Modern Art, 1990), 32.

[11] Suhanya Raffel, "Pop As Attitude, " from Andy Warhol, published in conjunction with the Queensland Art Gallery and The Andy Warhol Museum, (Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Art Gallery, 2007), 25.

[12] Bob Colacello, "Any Warhol's portraits: A personal view," in Andy Warhol Headshots [exhibition catalog], Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, 2000, unpaginated. Re-printed in "Pop As Attitude," by Suhanya Raffel, from Andy Warhol, published in conjunction with the Queensland Art Gallery and The Andy Warhol Museum, (Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Art Gallery, 2007), 24.