Andy Warhol

At 58 years old, Andy Warhol has this physical status:

Andy Warhola (born Andrew Warhola) was a leading figure in the pop art movement known as pop art from 1980 to 1989.

His books explore the link between artistic expression, advertisement, and celebrity culture that flourished in the 1960s and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, film, and sculpture.

Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), Marilyn Diptych (1964), and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67) are two of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), Campbell's The experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67). Warhol, a born and raised in Pittsburgh, began a fruitful career as a commercial illustrator.

He began to be recognized as a well-known and controversial artist after showing his work in many galleries in the late 1950s.

The Factory, his New York studio, became a well-known gathering space for distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons.

He marketed a group of Warhol celebrities and is credited with inciting the commonly used phrase "15 minutes of fame." He created The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine in the late 1960s.

He wrote numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties.

He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement was born.

Warhol died of cardiac arrest in February 1987 at the age of 58 following gallbladder surgery. Several retrospective exhibitions, books, and documentary films have been devoted to Warhol.

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which holds a permanent collection of art and archives, is the country's largest museum dedicated to a single artist.

Many of his works are both collectible and highly valuable.

Silver Car Crash, a 1963 canvas painting by Warhol, is the most expensive painting to ever sell; his sculptures include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

Warhol was referred to as the "bellwether of the art market" in a 2009 article in The Economist.

Personal life

Warhol was gay. He told an interviewer that he was still a virgin in 1980. Bob Colacello, a writer who attended the interview, said it was likely that the little sex he had was likely to be "a mixture of voyeurism and masturbation," meaning to use [Andy's] word abstract." Warhol's virginity seems to have been influenced by his hospitalization in 1960 for condylomata, a sexually transmitted disease. "He wasn't being Andy Warhol and when you were alone with him, he was a wonderful and kind person." The Andy Warhol, who I didn't know alone, was what grabbed me. In fact, when I was with him in public, he sparked me on my nerves....I'd say, 'You're just obnoxious, I can't bear you." Warhol was also a voyeur, according to Billy Name: "He was the essence of sexuality." It was all about everything. "It brought a smile to the whole art world in New York," Andy demonstrated, as well as his extraordinary artistic imagination. "But his personality was so fragile that it became a way to put up the blank front." John Giorno, Billy Name, Charles Lisanby, and Jon Gould were among Warhol's supporters. Jed Johnson, his mentor who first met him in 1968 and later rose to fame as an interior designer, was his boyfriend of 12 years.

Warhol's homosexuality influenced his art and influenced his relationship to the art world, according to a major topic of scholarship on the artist, and it was discussed by Warhol himself in interviews, e.g., Popism: The Warhol 1960s). Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes throughout his career. Many of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor's (portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, and films such as Blow Job, My Hustler, and Lonesome Cowboys) deviate from gay underground culture or openly explore the range of sexuality and desire. Many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters, including the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre and the 55th Street Playhouse in the late 1960s, as has been discussed by a number of scholars.

Warhol's first drawings of male nudes were rejected for being too openly gay, according to a fine art gallery. In Popism, the artist recalls a talk with filmmaker Emile de Antonio about Warhol's socially accepted by the then-famous (but not close) gay artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Warhol was "too swish, and that annodes them," De Antonio explained. "There was nothing I could say to that," Warhol says in response to this. It was all too true. So I decided against caring because those were all the things I didn't want to change anyway, and I didn't want to change my mind. I knew some people changed their habits but not me. Many people refer to this period, the late 1950s and early 1960s, as a pivotal point in Warhol's biography. Some have suggested that his regular refusal to comment on his work, to statements such as "Um, no" and "Yes" in interviews, and even encouraging others to speak for him) — and even the evolution of his pop style — can be traced back to the years when Warhol was first dismissed by the New York art world's inner circles.

Warhol was a practicing Ruthenian Catholic. He regularly worked at homeless shelters in New York City, particularly during the year's busier times, and has described himself as a religious person. Many of Warhol's later works depicted religious subjects, including two series titled "Intuitive Paintings (1984) and The Last Supper (1986). In addition, a body of religious-themed works was discovered posthumously in his estate.

Warhol sat or knelt in the pews at the back, and the priest at Warhol's church, Saint Vincent Ferrer, said the artist went to Liturgy on a daily basis. The priest was afraid of being recognized; Warhol said he was self-conscious about being seen in a Roman Rite church crossing himself "in the Orthodox way" (right to left instead of reverse). His art was unashamedly influenced by Eastern Christian tradition, which was especially evident in his places of worship. Warhol's brother has characterized the artist as "complete," but he didn't want people to know about it because [it was] private." Despite the personal nature of his faith, Warhol's eulogy John Richardson described it as devout: "To my good knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion." He took pride in sponsoring his nephew's studies for the priesthood.

Warhol was a voracious collector. His friends referred to his numerous collections, which included not only his four-story townhouse but also a nearby storage unit, labelled "Andy's Stuff." The full extent of his collections were not discovered until after his death, when The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh accepted 641 boxes of his "Stuff."

Warhol's collections included a Coca-Cola memorabilia sign and 19th-century paintings, assorted from airplane menus, unpaid bills, pornographic pulp novels, stamps, supermarket flyers, and cookie jars. It also included significant works of art, such as George Bellows' Miss Bentham. His wigs were one of his main collections. Warhol, a New York wig-maker, was more than 40 years old and felt very protective of his hairpieces, which were sewn by a New York wig-maker from hair imported from Italy. A girl snatched Warhol's wig off his head in 1985. "I don't know what stopped me from screaming out the balcony," Warhol's diary entry for the day.

In 1960, he had bought a light bulb drawing by Jasper Johns. A mummified human foot from Ancient Egypt was discovered in Warhol's boxes at the museum in Pittsburgh. Warhol most likely found it at a flea market, according to the curator of anthropology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Warhol's collection includes more than 1,200 titles. 139 titles have been identified in a 1988 Sotheby's Auction catalog, The Andy Warhol Collection, and can be viewed online. His book collection reflects his eclectic taste and passions, as well as books written by and about some of his acquaintances and acquaintances. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles: A Novel by Dominick Dunne, Artists in Uniform by Max Eastman, Andrews' Diseases of the Skin: Clinical Dermatology by George Clinton Andrews, D.V. Bella Vreeland, Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau, Watercolours by Francesco Clemente, Hello! Jimmy Savo, Hidden Faces by Salvador Dal, and The Dinah Shore Cookbook.

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