Andy Warhol
American, 1928-1987
Untitled, from the portfolio, "Flash-November 22, 1963", 1968
screenprint with teletype text, ed. 40/200
(a) 21 1/2 × 21 1/4 in. (b) 21 × 21 in.
SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Cheeryble Foundation
2001.37.8a,b
Warhol with Polaroid Big Shot Camera
"Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again." - Andy Warhol
RESEARCH PAPER
Andy Warhol mythologizes the Kennedy assassination, one of the most iconic events of the post-W.W. 2 era, not as horror but as pop iconography; not so much about emotion than about mass consumption, which was, after all, Warhol’s calling card.
"Flash - Nov. 22, 1963", at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, is a 21 ½ X 21 ¼ inch photographic silk screen in red and green, one of a series of eleven on the assassination, in print additions of 200. To the left of the composition is a vertical strip of green; green to depict the new beginnings of a celebrity presidency. Superimposed over the green is the truncated arc of the presidential seal outlined in red, a presidency cut short by murder. A corresponding strip on the right is a confused, indistinct jumble in red of what might be the eyes of the assassin stalking his prey or the windows of the book depository building where Lee Harvey Oswald took his shot. At the center, with an undercoat of red, are two images of Kennedy's head superimposed one on top of another. Kennedy was killed by a bullet to the head. A film clapper board in the foreground held by obscured hands references the 8-second film of the assassination recorded by a passer-by, Abraham Zapruder. It also speaks to Warhol’s, and our, obsession/desire for celebrity when everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Ever the populist, Warhol took the images from magazines and newspaper articles.
If you think it simplistic to see the green on the left with the aborted seal to symbolize a young and popular president cut down in his prime, and red for his blood, Warhol would agree with you. He was the artist for the time, accessible, populist, and non-intellectual. Film and television were the mass media of the day, where anyone can be a celebrity for fifteen minutes. As Warhol said of himself, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” (Warhol Diaries)
Andy Warhol did not invent pop art; Marcel Duchamp preceded him by 50 years and Roy Lichtenstein was his contemporary. But Warhol did democratize the art of the banal through his mass-produced images of his Campbell’s soup cans, his Marilyns, Maos, Jackies, and Elvises. Warhol “really understood the power of the commodity and was himself very seduced by the power of commodity and understood how to produce himself as a commodity within that culture.” (Parr)
A man of many interests, Warhol loved movies and began experimenting with his own movies like the five-plus-hour “Sleep,” “Empire,” “Kiss” and a spate of cheaply made films. His studio and workspace, The Factory, was a destination for the rich, famous, the wish-to-be-seen, and for The Velvet Underground, a rock band he managed.
Andrew Warhola was born in Pittsburgh, PA. on Aug. 6, 1928, to Slovakian Byzantine Catholic parents. Despite an eclectic lifestyle and preoccupation with sex and celebrity, he attended church weekly and prayed regularly with his mother well into his middle age. At the age of 8, he contracted Chorea, a movement disorder. While relegated to his bed, his mother, an artist herself, gave him art lessons which he took to avidly. Later she gave him a camera fostering his appreciation of photography. He developed his own negatives in the family basement. Andy’s father recognized his son’s artistic talents and, in his will, dictated that his life savings go to Andy’s college education. (Biography.com)
Andy Warhol invented himself. Although he states he was a self-taught artist, Andy went to Carnegie Institute for Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to study pictorial design. Upon graduating in 1949, he moved to New York in search of a graphic design career, dropped the ‘a’ in Warhola, quickly landed employment at Glamour magazine, and soon became one of the most successful commercial artists of the 1950s. Then he turned to painting. In a conversation with a friend about what commodity has never been painted before, the friend suggested soup cans. That’s one explanation for his series of Campbell’s soups. It’s also what his mother served him for his daily lunch when she moved in with Andy from 1952 to 1970. She died in Pittsburgh in 1972. (Warhol Diaries)
In 1968, a disgruntled playwright and actress who had tried to get Warhol to produce her play shot two bullets into Warhol’s stomach, tearing through his liver, spleen, esophagus, and both lungs. He never fully recovered. Warhol had a horror of hospitals and avoided doctors. Following a grueling gall bladder operation that should have been performed years earlier, he died at NY Presbyterian Hospital on Feb. 22, 1987, and was buried in the St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania – an homage to his heritage and his religion.
Two months after his death, a ten-day sale of Warhol’s art at Sotheby’s raised over $25 million for a Warhol museum in Pittsburgh. In May 2022, a 1964 Warhol screen print, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, sold for $195 million at Christie's New York, the highest price ever achieved by an American artist at auction. (Vankin)
Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Laezer Schlomkowitz, January 2023
Bibliography
https//biography.com/artist/andy-warhol, June 23, 2013
Vankin, Deborah, LA Times, 9 May 2022
The Andy Warhol Diaries. Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett ed. Warner Books, 1989
Washington City Paper, Leonard Roberge, Sept. 18, 1998
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
These works are from a portfolio of eleven screen prints made from photographic newspaper coverage of the Kennedy assassination. They are accompanied by the teletype transcript of real-time news reports of the historic, tragic event from November 22, 1963. The fractured and sometimes overlaid images reflect the confusion and shock as the dreadful events unfolded on mass media
- You Are Going on a Trip, 2017