Andy Warhol, Art, College Term Papers.com


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Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol It is rare for an artist to become a celebrity, but Andy Warhol experienced much more than his “fifteen minutes of fame”, and became an icon of his generation. Warhol was involved in many artistic fields such as painting, filmmaking and photography, but nevertheless was a businessman, social connoisseur and self-promoter. He was a major contributor to the Pop art movement, a period when mainstream objects, such as comic strips, advertisements and celebrity photos, were incorporated into many works. Warhol’s Campbell Soup series and later his celebrity series are some of the most well known works of pop art, that are still referenced in print and advertising today. However, not all of his works dealt with intriguing celebrities or mainstream advertising. Few people are familiar with Warhol’s darker side, evident in his “Disaster” paintings, a period in which such tragedy as, car accidents, suicide and capital punishment captured Warhol’s interest. These morbid works differ from his Pop Art masterpieces, and are crucial in understanding Warhol’s overall body of work. Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, with a degree in pictorial design. He then went to New York City to work as a commercial illustrator, and later began painting towards the late 1950’s. His work did not gain notoriety until around 1962 when his Campbell soup prints and Marilyn Monroe painting gained respect in the art world. However this period was a tumultuous time in Warhol’s life. He was not yet a celebrity, and had his coming out as a homosexual, while at the same time the effects of the Vietnam conflict were felt across the country. These conflicting emotions can be seen many Warhol’s paintings, but later served as a catalyst for his “Disaster” paintings. In the early 1960s capital punishment became a powerful political issue. Warhol aimed to capture the feeling of an execution in his “Death and Disaster” masterpiece, “Electric Chair”. In it we see the image of an actual electric chair at Sing Sing state prison in New York. The chair had been the world’s most famous, with a total of 614 inmates being put to death. In 1963 the chair was abandoned for a more humane means of execution, the lethal injection. Produced just the next year, the painting shows an image of the unoccupied chair with the word “silence” eerily placed in the top right hand corner. Warhol’s color scheme involves using dark shadows to give the execution chamber a gloomy dungeon atmosphere. In addition to the shadows, the work itself is blurry and somewhat unclear, which adds to the melancholy feel of the execution chamber. It is obvious he is trying to paint an extremely negative portrait of the death penalty, a kind of artistic protest. He condemns condemn capital punishment by making the prisoners seem like the victims. One can imagine this painting as the viewpoint of a condemned prisoner, walking into this morose room and viewing the instrument of his death. However, challengers to Warhol’s belief can argue that while the electric chair we see in this work is barbaric, we don’t know what crimes were committed to lead to a room like this. Someone facing this electric chair could have committed a gruesome crime and deserved such a fate. Warhol only gives us a viewpoint of the scared inmate, if we were to know what led to this person being executed, we would be less sympathetic. Warhol’s use of the infamous Sing Sing chair did not stop with this one painting. In 1967 he produced “Big Electric Chair”, which differed from its predecessor in many ways. In this version, he focused in on the chair itself, making the chair stand out, as if it were on stage. This time we see much less background, giving the impression that someone might this time be in the room. Perhaps this is a new viewpoint Warhol gives his “inmate”, a closer vantagepoint for his condemned prisoner. The color used in this work seems to take away from the gloomy, ominous tone of the first, however a sense of morbidity remains. Though the presentation is different, the theme of the original “Electric Chair” remains. Warhol is trying to strengthen his argument by using different viewpoints. The colors of this work strengthen his argument because such hues should have no part in such a gloomy place. The full use of color gives the work a more painterly appearance than the first, and creates striking juxtaposition between the vivid color and dark subject matter. This was Warhol’s intention, he wanted to present fun, acrylic colors illuminating a desolate tool of death. The colors prove a shocking means of giving the painting a lighthearted feel, in the hopes that the viewer will reassess their own beliefs on capital punishment. The Electric Chair series continued in 1971 with Warhol reprinting several of the Sing Sing chairs, using repetition, various positions, and different colors. Each one of these prints evokes different senses and has a different mood, while staying true to the original theme. This series of prints is an epic conclusion to Warhol’s original electric chair. The works differ from the original in a variety of ways, however the theme and ideas behind the series remains true to the original. Due to the number of different works he produced on this topic, we can conclude capital punishment captivated Warhol’s artistic mind, and his opposition proved a key-motivating factor in producing these masterpieces. This electric chair series shows a side of Warhol not seen in his most popular works. Through these paintings, he is able to successfully voice his opinion on capital punishment, and by giving vision to an otherwise aural debate, he presents an extremely convincing argument. Few people ever see what an execution chamber actually looks like, and with Warhol making this setting as dark as possible, he makes a very powerful and lasting statement. Bibliography:

Word Count: 982