ps, and hand-cut silk-screens. He used shocking images from tabloids and products from consumer society, including Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Campbell's Soup. Warhol said that art was about:"Images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognise in a split second; comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the abstract expressionists tried not to notice at all."This transformed the once struggling commercial illustrator into one of the most recognised and influential artists of the century. Death And DisasterIn the summer of 1962, Warhol's friend Henry Geldzahler laid out a copy the Daily News while the two were having lunch. On the cover, the headline was "129 Die in Jet." According to Warhol, that is what began a series of paintings imaging rather gruesome images of human death and disaster, with subjects ranging from the personal focus of individual suicide, the banality of everyday disasters, death by legal execution, to the historical death of political assassination, and the most destructive instrument in the world, the atom bomb. Together, these works are among the most shocking and disturbing works of art the world has ever known. In most of these works, Warhol displays death as an ever-present subject. His first silk-screened death and disaster paintings were of suicides and especially gruesome car crashes, the power and suffering shown in the images stun viewers. Warhol found the images from clippings of newspapers, magazines and photographs which he had preserved. He changed the pictures only slightly, he wanted to show the images as they were, everyday occurrences the public accepts yet forgets.Among the most iconic Death and Disaster images is the "Electric Chair."(1963) According to Warhol, he was trying to "empty" the image of it`s meaning. He used the composition and printing technique to attempt this.The electric chair is shown...
