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 that included painting, filmmaking, publisher, record producer, and photography, but at the same time he was a businessman, social commentator 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 used in print and advertising today. However, not all of his works dealt with intriguing celebrities or mainstream advertising. Scores of artists have revealed more than one side of their persona and Warhol had an area within himself that was different than the bulk of his visual output that seemed a bit morbid. Warhol's darker side is evident in his "Death and Disaster" series. This was a period in which he related such tragedies as car accidents, suicide, capital punishment, and gang warfare that seems to be more than a passing inte
rest for Warhol. These morbid works differ from his Pop Art pieces and are a part of trying to understand Warhol's catalogue of work. The "Electric Chair" series continued in 1971 with Warhol reprinting several of the Sing Sing chairs in a repetitive fashion using various positions and colors. Each one of these pieces gives a different feel for the chamber and the electric chair itself while at the same time staying true to the original theme. These series of prints were the conclusion to Warhol's original electric chair. 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 begin to be noticed until around 1962 when his "Campbell Soup" prints and "Marilyn Monroe" silk screens grabbed the interest of the art world. Warhol incorporated into his work the "Electric Chair" a gloomy dungeon atmosphere that involved the use of dark shadows. In addition to the shadows, the work itself is blurred and this adds to the horrifying feel of the execution chamber. It is plain to see that he is trying to create an extremely negative vision of the death penalty, a kind of artistic protest. He condemns capital punishment by applying the opinion that the prisoner seems like the victim. This work possib
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 936
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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