Hello, welcome to artistinschool.com com. Today, I'm going to be telling you 10 interesting facts plus
one amazing bonus fact, about the great American artist Andy Warhol. Warhol was an artist, a director,
a film producer and leading light in the visual art movement known as pop art. He used a variety
of media including painting silk-screening and filmmaking in his work, to explore the link between
artistic expression, advertising and the celebrity culture that flourished in the 1960s. Fact number
one, Ondrej Warhola, he would anglicize his name to Andy Warhol later in life, was born in Pittsburgh,
the youngest of three children to immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia. His mother was
devoted to him and used to go door-to-door selling the flowers she made from tin cans, to supplement
the family income. She would also read Andy stories from comics and reward him with chocolate
bars when he finished coloring pages from his coloring books. When Andy was 24 his mother moved
into his apartment and lived with him until 1971, when he was 43 years old. Fact number two, around
the age of nine years old Andy Warhol contracted Chorea which is a nervous disorder that left him
bedridden for a number of months. As a result, his skin and his hair, lost pigment. The enforced time
at home resulted in him using lots of coloring books, reading Superman comics and idolizing
celebrities. Maybe that was the inspiration for the pop art that was to come later in life. Fact
number three, even at a young age Andy Warhol thought differently for his peers. An incident that
happened at high school illustrates this perfectly. In one of his art lessons his class was asked to
prepare an illustrated Willa Cather short story. Most of his classmates painted pictures of trains
bridges and the hero of the story's suicidal leap. Andy Warhol's response was simply to pour a tin
of red paint onto a sheet of paper from a standing position. It splattered all over the paper. Painting
finished. One of his teachers thought his painting was the most inventive painting he had ever seen.
Another teacher thought he was the student least likely to succeed. Fact number 4. In 1949 Andy
moves to New York with artist Philip Pearlstein. He gets his first job working for a Glamour magazine
where he illustrates an article called, 'What is Success'. He uses a very crude blotted line
to create the drawing. A complete contrast to the sophisticated detailed drawings and
illustrations of the time. His drawings were an instant success and he was soon regarded as the
next hot new talent. Fact number 5. In 1960 Andy is a rich commercial artist and is at the top of his
trade, but he desires fame. After all, who has ever heard of a famous commercial artist? Art provides
the answer. So he begins to create hand-painted pop paintings, based on comic strips, such as Popeye.
Around this time he starts to wear outrageous wigs. They are often ill-fitting and as he once said, 'I am
a deeply superficial person. If you wear a wig everybody notices. Fact number 6. When walking
around a supermarket with a friend he came up with the idea of creating pictures of Campbell's soup
cans. He screen printed hundreds of prints featuring all 32 varieties of the soup. Four out of five of every
can of soup sold in America at this time was produced by Campbell's, so he thought his prints
were bound to be popular. He adopted an assembly line production techniques, to create hundreds of
images of soup cans and in 1962 the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, gave Andy a solo exhibition of
his soup can paintings. As a joke the gallery next door put real Campbell soup cans in the window
advertising them for 5 for $1. Fact number seven. In 1963 Andy set up a studio in a disused factory, and
invited various weird and wonderful individuals to come work with him. The factory was covered
on the inside with silver foil, which created really interesting effects when he used flash
photography. He created a whole series of screen prints of electric chairs and car crashes, Elvis
Presley and the death of President Kennedy. Fame was increasing and the glitterati were beginning
to take notice. Fact number 8. In 1964 Andy moved out of the painting studio and set up a film
studio. It produced a number of very unusual films including one about the Empire State Building.
Simply, a film of the lights on the building going on and off and lasted for eight hours. And people
came to watch it. His film 'Chelsea Girls' created in 1966 was a double screen movie and was his
greatest critical and commercial success. During 1965 after his Flower Exhibition in Paris Andy
announced that he was going to retire from painting. This was a fantastic marketing strategy.
Buy your Andy Warhol paintings now, because there's not going to be any more of them. Fact number 9.
On the 3rd of June 1968 Valerie Solanas walked into Andy's film studio and shot him twice in
the stomach. She claimed to represent S.C.U.M., the Society for Cutting Up Men and blamed Andy
for losing her film script, which is why she shot him. Andy later described the incident saying
it seemed unreal, like watching the movie. One in which the pain was real. Fact number 10. Between 1970 and
the 1980s and he was in demand. Stars including Mick Jagger and Truman Capote flopped to have
their portraits produced. Perhaps his most famous portraits of this period centre around Chairman
Mao, the Chinese leader and President Nixon. You may be aware that in China red is revered and regarded
as a lucky colour. Which might explain why Warhol chose to colour Moa's face blue. And controversially
his 1972 presidential poster for Nixon, whose face he coloured green, contains the interesting slogan,
Vote McGovern. Bonus Fact. In 1987, after having a routine operation for a gallbladder complaint
Andy was put into the care of a private nurse. But she failed to notice that his lips had turned blue.
As a result Andy Warhol died of heart failure aged just 58. The sale of the contents of his
house raised 25 million dollars and formed the basis of the Andy Warhol foundation for the visual
arts, which gives grants to organizations and institutions that support up-and-coming artists.
Andy started life in a relatively poor immigrant family, but through his enormous creative energy,
his talent and his sheer ambition, he ended up becoming a rich and famous celebrity artist. He
did indeed live the American dream. Thank you for watching artistinschool.com. I hope
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