Andy Warhol

By the time his work was shown in Ann Arbor in 1963, Warhol and his art had already gone through several transformations. Born Andrew Warhola to Slovakian immigrants in Pittsburgh, 1928, he developed an interest in drawing and studied commercial art at the Carnegie  Institute of Technology in the  late 1940s. He moved to New York and a successful career drawing  stylish advertisements for publication. In New York he changed his name to the more fashionable and ethnically ambiguous “Andy Warhol” and soon underwent rhinoplasty to achieve a comparable appearance.  Cosmetic transformation is perhaps an undertone in the painting series Before and After (1961), early works that were shown in the “Six Painters” exhibition in Ann Arbor.  Warhol’s paintings , based on advertisements adapted from tabloids, comics, commercial labels and low-class publications, were quite new at the time they  appeared the break-out “New Realists” exhibition at the Janis Gallery in 1962 and struck many critics as disturbing; the critic Harold Rosenberg wrote, “Andy Warhol . . . does columns of Campbell’s Soup labels in narcotic reiteration, like a joke without humor told over and over again, until it carries a hint of menace” (Rosenberg 1962) .  Warhol’s own star was rising as well and by 1963 he had secured representation with a gallery and shown work in Europe. He would become the most famous of the artists shown in Ann Arbor. By the time of his death in 1987, Warhol was celebrated for making fame itself into an art form. 

-RZ