A R T Where to see the work for free, which print and book to buy.

Andy Warhol

In copyright1928-1987·American·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Pittsburgh on 6 August 1928, he died in New York City on 22 February 1987, of a cardiac arrhythmia after gallbladder surgery. In the 1950s he was a commercial illustrator, and his shoe drawings for I. Miller won an Art Directors Club award in 1956; from 1962 he was Pop art's best-known painter and printmaker.

Why they matter

He made the supermarket and the celebrity photograph into painting, and then made the making look like a factory. The thirty-two Campbell's Soup Cans, first shown at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles on 9 July 1962 on narrow ledges like groceries on a shelf, were in fact traced and painted by hand; the silkscreen came next, and with the Marilyn Diptych of the same year the repetition became mechanical in fact as well as in look.

What to buy

Prints: his images are reproduced everywhere, and a poster is a poster: choose it for paper and print quality, and do not pay for "limited edition" wording. Know the Sunday B. Morning screenprints before you meet them. They were begun around 1970 by a Belgian publisher working from his images, and are stamped on the back "fill in your own signature" and "published by Sunday B. Morning". Warhol later disowned the project. They are decorative screenprints, not Warhol prints, and should be priced as such.

Books: Taschen's Andy Warhol. Seven Illustrated Books 1952-1959 reprints the handmade books he gave to his most valued contacts in his illustrator years, including 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy and In the Bottom of My Garden; it is the affordable way to own the 1950s Warhol. Klaus Honnef's Basic Art Warhol is the short introduction. For the prints, the reference is Feldman and Schellmann's Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne.

Originals: the real prints are auction-house pieces. From 1967 his own imprint, Factory Additions, published the portfolios, such as Campbell's Soup I (1968) and II (1969), ten screenprints each in editions of 250. Check any sheet against Feldman and Schellmann. There is no longer anyone to vouch for a painting: the Andy Warhol Foundation's authentication board, set up in 1995, stopped taking requests in 2011 after years of expensive lawsuits, and the foundation now works on catalogues raisonnes instead.

Notes

MoMA owns the thirty-two Soup Cans, which the dealer Irving Blum had bought as a set; it acquired them in 1996. Tate owns the Marilyn Diptych. He is in copyright, so this entry links no free image archives.

Story

In 1964 Warhol made five square Marilyn Monroe canvases, forty inches a side, identical but for their colours: red, orange, light blue, sage blue and turquoise. That autumn four of them were stacked at the Factory, his studio, when the performance artist Dorothy Podber came by and asked whether she could shoot them. Warhol said yes, thinking she meant photograph them. She took out a revolver and fired a single bullet through the stack, hitting Monroe, it was said, right between the eyes.

The canvases were repaired, and the shot became their name: the Shot Marilyns. Four years later the target was the painter. On 3 June 1968, at the Factory, the writer Valerie Solanas shot Warhol himself, and he spent nearly two months in hospital.

The paintings outlived both shootings. In May 2022 one of the five, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, sold at Christie's to the dealer Larry Gagosian, setting the auction record for an American artist and for any work of the twentieth century. It was sold under the name the bullet gave it.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Tate (Marilyn Diptych, 1962) ↗The Met ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗Tate ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

Taschen (Andy Warhol. Seven Illustrated Books 1952-1959) ↗Taschen (Warhol, Basic Art, Klaus Honnef) ↗AbeBooks (Feldman and Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

See also

David Hockney 1937-2026Yayoi Kusama 1929-2026Victor Vasarely 1906-1997Roy Lichtenstein 1923-1997Claes Oldenburg 1929-2022Jeff Koons b. 1955Sigmar Polke 1941-2010James Rosenquist 1933-2017

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