The most famous of the surviving Byzantine mosaics of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople - the image of Christ Pantocrator on the walls of the upper southern gallery. Christ is flanked by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. The mosaics were made in the 12th century.

Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Byzantine Empire from about the 5th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

The term can also be used for the art of Eastern Orthodox states which were contemporary with the Byzantine Empire and were culturally influenced by it, without actually being part of it (the "Byzantine commonwealth"), such as Bulgaria, Serbia, or Rus and also for the art of the Republic of Venice and Kingdom of Sicily, which had close ties to the Byzantine Empire despite being in other respects part of western European culture. Art produced by Eastern Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire is often called "post-Byzantine." Certain artistic traditions that originated in the Byzantine Empire, particularly in regard to icon painting and church architecture, are maintained in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries to the present day.

Introduction[link]

Just as the Byzantine Empire represented the political continuation of the Roman Empire, Byzantine art developed out of the art of the Roman Empire, which was itself profoundly influenced by ancient Greek art. Byzantine art never lost sight of this classical heritage. The Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was adorned with a large number of classical sculptures,^[1] although they eventually became an object of some puzzlement for its inhabitants.^[2] And indeed, the art produced during the Byzantine Empire, although marked by periodic revivals of a classical aesthetic, was above all marked by the development of a new aesthetic.

The most salient feature of this new aesthetic was its “abstract,” or anti-naturalistic character. If classical art was marked by the attempt to create representations that mimicked reality as closely as possible, Byzantine art seems to have abandoned this attempt in favor of a more symbolic approach.

Miniatures of the 6th-century Rabula Gospel display the more abstract and symbolic nature of Byzantine art.

The nature and causes of this transformation, which largely took place during late antiquity, have been a subject of scholarly debate for centuries.^[3] Giorgio Vasari attributed it to a decline in artistic skills and standards, which had in turn been revived by his contemporaries in the Italian Renaissance. Although this point of view has been occasionally revived, most notably by Bernard Berenson,^[4] modern scholars tend to take a more positive view of the Byzantine aesthetic. Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski, writing in the early 20th century, were above all responsible for the revaluation of late antique art.^[5] Riegl saw it as a natural development of pre-existing tendencies in Roman art, whereas Strzygowski viewed it as a product of “oriental” influences. Notable recent contributions to the debate include those of Ernst Kitzinger,^[6] who traced a “dialectic” between “abstract" and "Hellenistic” tendencies in late antiquity, and John Onians,^[7] who saw an “increase in visual response” in late antiquity, through which a viewer “could look at something which was in twentieth-century terms purely abstract and find it representational.”

In any case, the debate is purely modern: it is clear that most Byzantine viewers did not consider their art to be abstract or unnaturalistic. As Cyril Mango has observed, “our own appreciation of Byzantine art stems largely from the fact that this art is not naturalistic; yet the Byzantines themselves, judging by their extant statements, regarded it as being highly naturalistic and as being directly in the tradition of Phidias, Apelles, and Zeuxis.”^[8]

Frescoes in Nerezi near Skopje (1164), with their unique blend of high tragedy, gentle humanity, and homespun realism, anticipate the approach of Giotto and other proto-Renaissance Italian artists.^{[citation needed]}

The subject matter of monumental Byzantine art was primarily religious and imperial: the two themes are often combined, as in the portraits of later Byzantine emperors that decorated the interior of the sixth-century church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. These preoccupations are partly a result of the pious and autocratic nature of Byzantine society, and partly a result of its economic structure: the wealth of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the church and the imperial office, which therefore had the greatest opportunity to undertake monumental artistic commissions.

Religious art was not, however, limited to the monumental decoration of church interiors. One of the most important genres of Byzantine art was the icon, an image of Christ, the Virgin, or a saint, used as an object of veneration in Orthodox churches and private homes alike. Icons were more religious than aesthetic in nature: especially after the end of iconoclasm, they were understood to manifest the unique “presence” of the figure depicted by means of a “likeness” to that figure maintained through carefully maintained canons of representation.^[9]

The illumination of manuscripts was another major genre of Byzantine art. The most commonly illustrated texts were religious, both scripture itself (particularly the Psalms) and devotional or theological texts (such as the Ladder of Divine Ascent of John Climacus or the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus). Secular texts were also illuminated: important examples include the Alexander Romance and the history of John Skylitzes.

The Byzantines inherited the Early Christian distrust of monumental sculpture in religious art, and produced only reliefs, of which very few survivals are anything like life-size, in sharp contrast to the medieval art of the West, where monumental sculpture revived from Carolingian art onwards. Small ivories were also mostly in relief.

“Minor” or “luxury” arts (i.e. ivories, steatites, enamels, jewelry, metalwork, ceramics, etc.) were produced in large number throughout the Byzantine era. Many of these were also religious in nature, although a large number of objects with secular or non-representational decoration were produced: for example, ivories representing themes from classical mythology, and ceramics decorated with figures that may derive from the Akritic epics.

Periods[link]

Byzantine art and architecture is divided into four periods by convention: the Early period, commencing with the Edict of Milan (when Christian worship was legitimized) and the transfer of the imperial seat to Constantinople, extends to 842 AD, with the conclusion of Iconoclasm; the Middle, or high period, begins with the restoration of the icons in 843 and culminates in the Fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204; the Late period includes the eclectic osmosis between Western European and traditional Byzantine elements in art and architecture, and ends with the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The term post-Byzantine is then used for later years, whereas Neo-byzantine is used for art and architecture from the 19th century onwards, when the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire prompted a renewed appreciation of Byzantium by artists and historians alike.

Early Byzantine art[link]

Leaf from an ivory diptych of Areobindus Dagalaiphus Areobindus, consul in Constantinople, 506. Areobindus is shown above, presiding over the games in the Hippodrome, depicted beneath.

Two events were of fundamental importance to the development of a unique, Byzantine art. First, the Edict of Milan, issued by the emperors Constantine I and Licinius in 313, allowed for public Christian worship, and led to the development of a monumental, Christian art. Second, the dedication of Constantinople in 330 created a great new artistic centre for the eastern half of the Empire, and a specifically Christian one. Other artistic traditions flourished in rival cities such as Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, but it was not until all of these cities had fallen - the first two to the Arabs and Rome to the Goths - that Constantinople established its supremacy.

Constantine devoted great effort to the decoration of Constantinople, adorning its public spaces with ancient statuary,^[10] and building a forum dominated by a porphyry column that carried a statue of himself.^[11] Major Constantinopolitan churches built under Constantine and his son, Constantius II, included the original foundations of Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Apostles.^[12]

The next major building campaign in Constantinople was sponsored by Theodosius I. The most important surviving monument of this period is the obelisk and base erected by Theodosius in the Hippodrome.^[13] The earliest surviving church in Constantinople is the Basilica of St. John at the Stoudios Monastery, built in the fifth century.^[14]

Due to subsequent rebuilding and destruction, relatively few Constantinopolitan monuments of this early period survive. However, the development of monumental early Byzantine art can still be traced through surviving structures in other cities. For example, important early churches are found in Rome (including Santa Sabina and Santa Maria Maggiore),^[15] and in Thessaloniki (the Rotunda and the Acheiropoietos Basilica).^[16]

A number of important illuminated manuscripts, both sacred and secular, survive from this early period. Classical authors, including Virgil (represented by the Vergilius Vaticanus^[17] and the Vergilius Romanus^[18]) and Homer (represented by the Ambrosian Iliad), were illustrated with narrative paintings. Illuminated biblical manuscripts of this period survive only in fragments: for example, the Quedlinburg Itala fragment is a small portion of what must have been a lavishly illustrated copy of 1 Kings.^[19]

Early Byzantine art was also marked by the cultivation of ivory carving.^[20] Ivory diptychs, often elaborately decorated, were issued as gifts by newly appointed consuls.^[21] Silver plates were another important form of luxury art:^[22] among the most lavish from this period is the Missorium of Theodosius I.^[23] Sarcophagi continued to be produced in great numbers.

The Age of Justinian[link]

Significant changes in Byzantine art coincided with the reign of Justinian I (527-565). Justinian devoted much of his reign to reconquering Italy, North Africa and Spain. He also laid the foundations of the imperial absolutism of the Byzantine state, codifying its laws and imposing his religious views on all his subjects by law.^[24]

Mosaic from San Vitale in Ravenna, showing the Emperor Justinian and Bishop Maximian of Ravenna surrounded by clerics and soldiers.

A significant component of Justinian's project of imperial renovation was a massive building program, which was described in a book, the Buildings, written by Justinian's court historian, Procopius.^[25] Justinian renovated, rebuilt, or founded anew countless churches within Constantinople, including Hagia Sophia,^[26] which had been destroyed during the Nika riots, the Church of the Holy Apostles,^[27] and the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus.^[28] Justinian also built a number of churches and fortifications outside of the imperial capital, including the Monastery of St. Catherine on the Sinai Peninsula,^[29] and the Basilica of St. John in Ephesus.^[30]

Several major churches of this period were built in the provinces by local bishops in imitation of the new Constantinopolitan foundations. The Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, was built by Bishop Maximianus. The decoration of San Vitale includes important mosaics of Justinian and his empress, Theodora, although neither ever visited the church.^[31] Also of note is the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč.^[32]

19-20th century archeological discoveries unearthed a large group of Early Byzantine mosaics in the Middle East. The eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman and later the Byzantine Empires inherited a strong artistic tradition from the Late Antiquity. Christian mosaic art flourished in this area from the 4th century onwards. The tradition of making mosaics was carried on in the Umayyad era until the end of the 8th century. The most important surviving examples are the Madaba Map, the mosaics of Mount Nebo, Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai and the Church of St Stephen in ancient Kastron Mefaa (now Umm ar-Rasas).

The first fully preserved illuminated biblical manuscripts date to the first half of the sixth century, most notably the Vienna Genesis,^[33] the Rossano Gospels,^[34] and the Sinope Gospels.^[35] The Vienna Dioscurides is a lavishly illustrated botanical treatise, presented as a gift to the Byzantine aristocrat Julia Anicia.^[36]

Important ivory sculptures of this period include the Barberini ivory, which probably depicts Justinian himself,^[37] and the Archangel ivory in the British Museum.^[38] Silver plate continued to be decorated with scenes drawn from classical mythology; for example, a plate preserved in the Cabinet des Médailles, Paris, depicts Hercules wrestling the Nemean lion.

The seventh-century crisis[link]

Mosaic from the church of Hagios Demetrios in Thessaloniki, late 7th or early 8th century, showing St. Demetrios with donors.

The Age of Justinian was followed by a political decline, since most of Justinian's conquests were lost and the Empire faced acute crisis with the invasions of the Avars, Slavs, Persians and Arabs in the 7th century. Constantinople was also wracked by religious and political conflict.^[39]

The most significant surviving monumental projects of this period were undertaken outside of the imperial capital. The church of Hagios Demetrios in Thessaloniki was rebuilt after a fire in the mid-seventh century. The new sections include mosaics executed in a remarkably abstract style.^[40] The church of the Koimesis in Nicaea (present-day Iznik), destroyed in the early 20th century but documented through photographs, demonstrates the simultaneous survival of a more classical style of church decoration.^[41] The churches of Rome, still a Byzantine territory in this period, also include important surviving decorative programs, especially Santa Maria Antiqua, Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, and the Chapel of San Venanzio in San Giovanni in Laterano.^[42] Byzantine mosaicists probably also contributed to the decoration of the early Umayyad monuments, including the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus.^[43]

Important works of luxury art from this period include the silver David Plates, produced during the reign of Heraclius, and depicting scenes from the life of the Hebrew king David.^[44] The most notable surviving manuscripts are Syriac gospel books, such as the so-called Syriac Bible of Paris.^[45] However, the London Canon Tables bear witness to the continuing production of lavish gospel books in Greek.^[46]

The period between Justinian and iconoclasm saw major changes in the social and religious roles of images within Byzantium. The veneration of acheiropoieta, or holy images "not made by human hands," became a significant phenomenon, and in some instances these images were credited with saving cities from military assault. By the end of the seventh century, certain images of saints had come to be viewed as "windows" through which one could communicate with the figure depicted. Proskynesis before images is also attested in texts from the late seventh century. These developments mark the beginnings of a theology of icons.^[47]

At the same time, the debate over the proper role of art in the decoration of churches intensified. Three canons of the Quinisext Council of 692 addressed controversies in this area: prohibition of the representation of the cross on church pavements (Canon 73), prohibition of the representation of Christ as a lamb (Canon 82), and a general injunction against "pictures, whether they are in paintings or in what way so ever, which attract the eye and corrupt the mind, and incite it to the enkindling of base pleasures" (Canon 100).

Iconoclasm[link]

Helios in his chariot, surrounded by symbols of the months and of the zodiac. From Vat. Gr. 1291, the "Handy Tables" of Ptolemy, produced during the reign of Constantine V.

Intense debate over the role of art in worship led eventually to the period of "Byzantine iconoclasm."^[48] Sporadic outbreaks of iconoclasm on the part of local bishops are attested in Asia Minor during the 720s. In 726, an underwater earthquake between the islands of Thera and Therasia was interpreted by Emperor Leo III as a sign of God's anger, and may have led Leo to remove a famous icon of Christ from the Chalke Gate outside the imperial palace.^[49] However, iconoclasm probably did not become imperial policy until the reign of Leo's son, Constantine V. The Council of Hieria, convened under Constantine in 754, proscribed the manufacture of icons of Christ. This inaugurated the Iconoclastic period, which lasted, with interruptions, until 843.

While iconoclasm severely restricted the role of religious art, and led to the removal of some earlier apse mosaics and (possibly) the sporadic destruction of portable icons, it never constituted a total ban on the production of figural art. Ample literary sources indicate that secular art (i.e. hunting scenes and depictions of the games in the hippodrome) continued to be produced,^[50] and the few monuments that can be securely dated to the period (most notably the manuscript of Ptolemy's "Handy Tables" today held by the Vatican^[51]) demonstrate that metropolitan artists maintained a high quality of production.^[52]

Major churches dating to this period include Hagia Eirene in Constantinople, which was rebuilt in the 760s following its destruction by an earthquake in 740. The interior of Hagia Eirene, which is dominated by a large mosaic cross in the apse, is one of the best-preserved examples of iconoclastic church decoration.^[53] The church of Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki was also rebuilt in the late 8th century.^[54]

Certain churches built outside of the empire during this period, but decorated in a figural, "Byzantine," style, may also bear witness to the continuing activities of Byzantine artists. Particularly important in this regard are the original mosaics of the Palatine Chapel in Aachen (since either destroyed or heavily restored) and the frescoes in the Church of Maria foris portas in Castelseprio.

Macedonian Art[link]

An example of Macedonian ivorywork: the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, now in the Bode Museum, Berlin.

The rulings of the Council of Hieria were reversed by a new church council in 843, celebrated to this day in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the "Triumph of Orthodoxy." In 867, the installation of a new apse mosaic in Hagia Sophia depicting the Virgin and Child was celebrated by the Patriarch Photios in a famous homily as a victory over the evils of iconoclasm. Later in the same year, the Emperor Basil I, called "the Macedonian," acceded to the throne; as a result the following period of Byzantine art has sometimes been called the "Macedonian Renaissance", although the term is doubly problematic (it was neither "Macedonian", nor, strictly speaking, a "Renaissance").

In the 9th and 10th centuries the Empire's military situation improved, and patronage of art and architecture increased. New churches were commissioned, and the standard architectural form (the "cross-in-square") and decorative scheme of the Middle Byzantine church were standardised. Major surviving examples include Hosios Loukas in Boeotia, the Daphni Monastery near Athens and Nea Moni on Chios.

There was a revival of interest in the depiction of subjects from classical mythology (as on the Veroli Casket) and in the use of a "classical" style to depict religious, and particularly Old Testament, subjects (of which the Paris Psalter and the Joshua Roll are important examples)

The Macedonian period also saw a revival of the late antique technique of ivory carving. Many ornate ivory triptychs and diptychs survive, such as the Harbaville Triptych and a triptych at Luton Hoo, dating from the reign of Nicephorus Phocas).

Comnenian Age[link]

The Macedonian emperors were followed by the Komnenian dynasty, beginning with the reign of Alexios I Komnenos in 1081. Byzantium had recently suffered a period of severe dislocation following the battle of Manzikert in 1071 and the subsequent loss of Asia Minor to the Turks. However, the Komnenoi brought stability to the empire, (1081–1185), and during the course of the twelfth century their energetic campaigning did much to restore the fortunes of the empire. The Komnenoi were great patrons of the arts, and with their support Byzantine artists continued to move in the direction of greater humanism and emotion, of which the Theotokos of Vladimir, the cycle of mosaics at Daphni, and the murals at Nerezi yield important examples. Ivory sculpture and other expensive mediums of art gradually gave way to frescoes and icons, which for the first time gained widespread popularity across the Empire. Apart from painted icons, there were other varieties - notably the mosaic and ceramic ones.

The Annunciation from Ohrid, one of the most admired icons of the Paleologan Mannerism, bears comparison with the finest contemporary works by Italian artists.

Some of the finest Byzantine work of this period may be found outside the Empire: in the mosaics of Gelati, Kiev, Torcello, Venice, Monreale, Cefalù and Palermo. For instance, Venice's Basilica of St Mark, begun in 1063, was based on the great Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, now destroyed, and is thus an echo of the age of Justinian. The acquisitive habits of the Venetians mean that the basilica is also a great museum of Byzantine artworks of all kinds (e.g., Pala d'Oro).

Palaeologan Age[link]

Twenty-two hundred years of continuous Roman tradition and Sixteen hundred years of Hellenistic civilization were brought to an abrupt end in 1204 with the sacking of Constantinople by the Venetian and French knights of the Fourth Crusade, a disaster from which the Empire never recovered. Steven Runciman, greatest of 20th century crusade historians, would write in 1954: "There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade." The destruction by sack or subsequent neglect of the city's secular architecture in particular has left us without an imperfect understanding of Byzantine art.

Although the Byzantines regained the city in 1261, the Empire was thereafter a small and weak state confined to the Greek peninsula and the islands of the Aegean. During their half-century of exile, however, the last great flowing of Anatolian Hellenism began. As Nicaea emerged as the center of opposition under the Laskaris emperors, it spawned a renaissance, attracting scholars, poets, and artists from across the Byzantine world. A glittering court emerged as the dispossessed intelligentsia found in the Hellenic side of their traditions a pride and identity unsullied by association with the hated "latin" enemy.^[55] With the recapture of the capital under the new Palaeologan Dynasty, Byzantine artists developed a new interest in landscapes and pastoral scenes, and the traditional mosaic-work (of which the Chora Church in Constantinople is the finest extant example) gradually gave way to detailed cycles of narrative frescoes (as evidenced in a large group of Mystras churches). The icons, which became a favoured medium for artistic expression, were characterized by a less austere attitude, new appreciation for purely decorative qualities of painting and meticulous attention to details, earning the popular name of the Paleologan Mannerism for the period in general.

Byzantine Crete had been seized from the collapsed empire in 1211 by Venice, and Byzantine artistic traditions continued long after the Ottoman conquest of the last Byzantine successor state in 1461. The Cretan school, as it is today known, gradually introduced Western elements into its style, and exported large numbers of icons to the West. The tradition's most famous artist was El Greco.

Legacy[link]

St Mark's Basilica in Venice, where imported Byzantine mosaicists were succeeded by Italians they had trained.

The splendour of Byzantine art was always in the mind of early medieval Western artists and patrons, and many of the most important movements in the period were conscious attempts to produce art fit to stand next to both classical Roman and contemporary Byzantine art. This was especially the case for the imperial Carolingian art and Ottonian art. Luxury products from the Empire were highly valued, and reached for example the royal Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo burial in Suffolk of the 620s, which contains several pieces of silver. Byzantine silks were especially valued and large quantities were distributed as diplomatic gifts from Constantinople. There are records of Byzantine artists working in the West, especially during the period of iconoclasm, and some works, like the frescos at Castelseprio and miniatures in the Vienna Coronation Gospels, seem to have been produced by such figures.

In particular, teams of mosaic artists were despatched as diplomatic gestures by emperors to Italy, where they often trained locals to continue their work in a style heavily influenced by Byzantium. Venice and Norman Sicily were particular centres of Byzantine influence. The earliest surviving panel paintings in the West were in a style heavily influenced by contemporary Byzantine icons, until a distinctive Western style began to develop in Italy in the Trecento; the traditional and still influential narrative of Vasari and others has the story of Western painting begin as a breakaway by Cimabue and then Giotto from the shackles of the Byzantine tradition. In general Byzantine artistic influence on Europe was in steep decline by the 14th century if not earlier, despite the continued importance of migrated Byzantine scholars in the Renaissance in other areas.

Islamic art began with artists and craftsmen mostly trained in Byzantine styles, and though figurative content was greatly reduced, Byzantine decorative styles remained a great influence on Islamic art, and Byzantine artists continued to be imported for important works for some time, especially for mosaics.

Modern Orthodox mural from Israel using a depiction of the Nativity of Christ little changed in over a millennium.

The Byzantine era properly defined came to an end with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, but by this time the Byzantine cultural heritage had been widely diffused, carried by the spread of Orthodox Christianity, to Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and, most importantly, to Russia, which became the centre of the Orthodox world following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Even under Ottoman rule, Byzantine traditions in icon-painting and other small-scale arts survived, especially in the Venetian-ruled Crete and Rhodes, where a "post-Byzantine" style under increasing Western influence survived for a further two centuries, producing artists including El Greco whose training was in the Cretan School which was the most vigorous post-Byzantine school, exporting great numbers of icons to Europe.

Russian icon painting began by entirely adopting and imitating Byzantine art, as did the art of other Orthodox nations, and has remained extremely conservative in iconography, although its painting style has developed distinct characteristics, including influences from post-Renaissance Western art. All the Eastern Orthodox churches have retained highly protective of their traditions in terms of the form and content of images and, for example, modern Orthodox depictions of the Nativity of Christ vary little in content from those developed in the 6th century.

See also[link]

• Icon
• Sacred art
• Book of Job in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• J. Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine art (New Haven, 1993).
• R. Cormack, Byzantine art (Oxford, 2000).
• H.C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: faith and power (1261-1557) (New York, 2004).
• H.C. Evans, ed., The glory of Byzantium (New York, 1997).
• Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Julie A. Lauffenburger, ed., A Lost Art Rediscovered (Penn State, 2001) ISBN 0-271-02139-X
• C. Mango, ed., The art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453: sources and documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1972).
• K. Weitzmann, ed., Age of spirituality (New York, 1979).
• James, Elizabeth. Art and Text in Byzantine Culture (1 ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-83409-0. 
• Papadaki-Oekland, Stella. Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts of the Book of Job. ISBN 2-503-53232-2 & ISBN 978-2-503-53232-5

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Byzantine art or Byzantine mosaics or Byzantine paintings

• Byzantium, Faith and Power, 1261-1453. Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2004).
• The Glory of Byzantium. Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1997).
• "Byzantine art", from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
• "Byzantine art", from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Anthony Cutler on the economic history of Byzantine mosaics, wall-paintings and icons; at Dumbarton Oaks.
• BYZANTINE ICONS AND MOSAICS
• Byzantine Churches in Constantinople
• Contemporary Byzantine art

Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol, with Archie, by Jack Mitchell, 1973
Birth name	Andrew Varchola, Jr.
Born	(1928-08-06)August 6, 1928. Baptized August 28, 1928 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	February 22, 1987(1987-02-22) (aged 58) New York City, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Field	Printmaking, painting, cinema, photography
Training	Carnegie Institute of Technology
Movement	Pop art
Works	Chelsea Girls (1966 film) Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966 event) Campbell's Soup Cans (1962 painting)

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States of America dedicated to a single artist.

Overview[link]

Andy Warhol's artwork ranged in many forms of media that include hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1985, just before his death in 1987. He founded Interview Magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Andy Warhol is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame". Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market".^[1] Warhol's works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

Early life (1928–49)[link]

Warhol's childhood home. 3252 Dawson Street, South Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Andy Warhol (né Andrej Varchola, Jr.) was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.^[2] He was the fourth child of Ondrej Varchola (1889-1942)(americanized as Andrew Warhola,Sr.)^[3] and Júlia (née Zavacká, 1892–1972),^[4] whose first child was born in their homeland and died before their move to the U.S. Andy had two older brothers Paul, born about 1923 and John born about 1925.

His parents were working-class Rusyn^[5][6][7] emigrants from Mikó (now called Miková), located in today’s northeastern Slovakia, part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Warhol's father immigrated to the US in 1914, and his mother joined him in 1921, after the death of Warhol's grandparents. Warhol's father worked in a coal mine. The family lived at 55 Beelen Street and later at 3252 Dawson Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.^[8] The family was Byzantine Catholic and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Andy Warhol had two older brothers – Pavol (Paul), the oldest, was born in Slovakia; Ján was born in Pittsburgh. Pavol's son, James Warhola, became a successful children's book illustrator. About 1939, he starts collecting autographed cards of film stars.

In third grade, Warhol had chorea, the nervous system disease that causes involuntary movements of the extremities, which is believed to be a complication of scarlet fever and causes skin pigmentation blotchiness.^[9] He became a hypochondriac, developing a fear of hospitals and doctors. Often bedridden as a child, he became an outcast at school and bonded with his mother.^[10] At times when he was confined to bed, he drew, listened to the radio and collected pictures of movie stars around his bed. Warhol later described this period as very important in the development of his personality, skill-set and preferences. When Warhol was 13, his father died in an accident.^[11]

As a teenager, Warhol graduated from Schenley High School in the year 1945. Though not medically diagnosed, Andy had dyslexia, which contributed to broadening his imagination for art. He perceived the world differently from other artists, who did not have this disorder, which was somewhat of a underlying gift. After graduating from high school, his intentions were to study art education at the University of Pittsburgh in hopes of becoming an art teacher, but his plans changed to enrolling in the Carnegie Institute of Technology to pursue an art career as a commercial illustrator. In 1949, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design.

Phases of his artwork by decade[link]

1950s[link]

Former studio in New York

Warhol showed early artistic talent and studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, (now Carnegie Mellon University).^[12] In 1949, he moved to New York City and began a career in magazine illustration and advertising. During the 1950s, he gained fame for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements. These were done in a loose, blotted-ink style, and figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York. With the concurrent rapid expansion of the record industry and the introduction of the vinyl record, Hi-Fi, and stereophonic recordings, RCA Records hired Warhol, along with another freelance artist, Sid Maurer, to design album covers and promotional materials.^[13]

Warhol was an early adopter of the silk screen printmaking process as a technique for making paintings. His earliest silkscreening in painting involved hand-drawn images though this soon progressed to the use of photographically derived silkscreening in paintings. Prior to entering the field of fine art, Warhol's commercial art background also involved innovative techniques for image making that were somewhat related to printmaking techniques. When rendering commercial objects for advertising Warhol devised a technique that resulted in a characteristic image. His imagery used in advertising was often executed by means of applying ink to paper and then blotting the ink while still wet. This was a process akin to a printmaking process on the most rudimentary scale.^[14] Warhol's work both as a commercial artist and later a fine artist displays a casual approach to image making, in which chance plays a role and mistakes and unintentional marks are tolerated. The resulting imagery in both Warhol's commercial art and later in his fine art endeavors is often replete with imperfection—smudges and smears can often be found. In his book "POPism" Warhol says, "…when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something."^[15][16][17]

1960s[link]

He began exhibiting his work during the 1950s. He held exhibitions at the Hugo Gallery,^[18] and the Bodley Gallery^[19] in New York City and in California his first one-man art-gallery exhibition^[20][21] was on July 9, 1962, in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles. The exhibition marked his West Coast debut of pop art.^[22] Andy Warhol's first New York solo pop art exhibition was hosted at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery November 6–24, 1962. The exhibit included the works Marilyn Diptych, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles and 100 Dollar Bills. At the Stable Gallery exhibit, the artist met for the first time poet John Giorno who would star in Warhol's first film, Sleep, in 1963.^[23]

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory", his studio during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities. He began producing prints using the silkscreen method.^[24] His work became popular and controversial.

Among the imagery tackled by Warhol were dollar bills, celebrities and brand name products, as well as newspaper headlines or photographs of mushroom clouds, electric chairs, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters. Warhol also used Coca Cola bottles as subject matter for paintings. He had this to say about Coca Cola:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.^[25]

New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture. This symposium set the tone for Warhol's reception. Throughout the decade it became more and more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift.^{[citation needed]}

Warhol (left) and Tennessee Williams (right) talking on the SS France, 1967; in the background: Paul Morrissey.

A pivotal event was the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket, a show held in Paul Bianchini's Upper East Side gallery. The show was presented as a typical U.S. small supermarket environment, except that everything in it – from the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc. – was created by six prominent pop artists of the time, among them the controversial (and like-minded) Billy Apple, Mary Inman, and Robert Watts. Warhol's painting of a can of Campbell's soup cost $1,500 while each autographed can sold for $6. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what art is (or of what is art and what is not).^{[citation needed]}

As an advertisement illustrator in the 1950s, Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity. Collaboration would remain a defining (and controversial) aspect of his working methods throughout his career; in the 1960s, however, this was particularly true. One of the most important collaborators during this period was Gerard Malanga. Malanga assisted the artist with producing silkscreens, films, sculpture, and other works at "The Factory," Warhol's aluminum foil-and-silver-paint-lined studio on 47th Street (later moved to Broadway). Other members of Warhol's Factory crowd included Freddie Herko, Ondine, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov, Billy Name, and Brigid Berlin (from whom he apparently got the idea to tape-record his phone conversations).^[26]

During the 1960s, Warhol also groomed a retinue of bohemian eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "Superstars", including Nico, Joe Dallesandro, Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ultra Violet, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling. These people all participated in the Factory films, and some – like Berlin – remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world, such as writer John Giorno and film-maker Jack Smith, also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this time.

Attempted murder (1968)[link]

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Warhol as well as art critic and curator Mario Amaya at Warhol's studio.^[27] Before the shooting, Solanas had been a marginal figure in the Factory scene. She authored the S.C.U.M. Manifesto,^[28] a separatist feminist attack on males. Solanas appears in the 1968 Warhol film I, a Man. Earlier on the day of the attack, Solanas had been turned away from the Factory after asking for the return of a script she had given to Warhol. The script, apparently, had been misplaced.^[29]

Amaya received only minor injuries and was released from the hospital later the same day. Warhol, however, was seriously wounded by the attack and barely survived: surgeons opened his chest and massaged his heart to help stimulate its movement again. He suffered physical effects for the rest of his life. The shooting had a profound effect on Warhol's life and art.^[30][31]

Solanas was arrested the day after the assault. By way of explanation, she said that Warhol "had too much control over my life." She was eventually sentenced to three years under the control of the Department of Corrections. After the shooting, the Factory scene became much more tightly controlled, and for many the "Factory 60s" ended.^[31] The shooting was mostly overshadowed in the media due to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two days later.

Warhol had this to say about the attack: "Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television."^[32]

1970s[link]

Andy Warhol and Jimmy Carter in 1977

Compared to the success and scandal of Warhol's work in the 1960s, the 1970s were a much quieter decade, as he became more entrepreneurial. According to Bob Colacello, Warhol devoted much of his time to rounding up new, rich patrons for portrait commissions– including Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his wife Empress Farah Pahlavi, his sister Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Diana Ross, and Brigitte Bardot.^{[33][citation needed]} Warhol's famous portrait of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong was created in 1973. He also founded, with Gerard Malanga, Interview magazine, and published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975). An idea expressed in the book: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."^{[cite this quote]}

Warhol used to socialize at various nightspots in New York City, including Max's Kansas City; and, later in the 1970s, Studio 54.^[34] He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and a meticulous observer. Art critic Robert Hughes called him "the white mole of Union Square."^[35]

With his longtime friend Stuart Pivar, Warhol founded the New York Academy of Art in 1979.^[36][37]

1980s[link]

Warhol had a re-emergence of critical and financial success in the 1980s, partially due to his affiliation and friendships with a number of prolific younger artists, who were dominating the "bull market" of 1980s New York art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and other so-called Neo-Expressionists, as well as members of the Transavantgarde movement in Europe, including Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi.

By this period, Warhol was being criticized for becoming merely a "business artist".^[38] In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or indication of the significance of the subjects. They also criticized his 1980 exhibit of 10 portraits at the Jewish Museum in New York, entitled Jewish Geniuses, which Warhol – who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews – had described in his diary as "They're going to sell."^[38] In hindsight, however, some critics have come to view Warhol's superficiality and commerciality as "the most brilliant mirror of our times," contending that "Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture in the 1970s."^[38]

Warhol also had an appreciation for intense Hollywood glamour. He once said: "I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're so beautiful. Everything's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."^[39]

Death[link]

Warhol died in New York City at 6:32 a.m. on February 22, 1987. According to news reports, he had been making good recovery from a routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital before dying in his sleep from a sudden post-operative cardiac arrhythmia.^[40] Prior to his diagnosis and operation, Warhol delayed having his recurring gallbladder problems checked, as he was afraid to enter hospitals and see doctors. His family sued the hospital for inadequate care, saying that the arrhythmia was caused by improper care and water intoxication.^[41]

Warhol's grave at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery

Warhol's body was taken back to Pittsburgh by his brothers for burial. The wake was at Thomas P. Kunsak Funeral Home and was an open-coffin ceremony. The coffin was a solid bronze casket with gold plated rails and white upholstery. Warhol was dressed in a black cashmere suit, a paisley tie, a platinum wig, and sunglasses. He was posed holding a small prayer book and a red rose. The funeral liturgy was held at the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church on Pittsburgh's North Side. The eulogy was given by Monsignor Peter Tay. Yoko Ono, John Richardson, and Nicholas Love were speakers. The coffin was covered with white roses and asparagus ferns. After the liturgy, the coffin was driven to St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, a south suburb of Pittsburgh.

Statue of Andy Warhol in Bratislava, Slovakia.

At the grave, the priest said a brief prayer and sprinkled holy water on the casket. Before the coffin was lowered, Paige Powell dropped a copy of Interview magazine, an Interview t-shirt, and a bottle of the Estee Lauder perfume "Beautiful" into the grave. Warhol was buried next to his mother and father. A memorial service was held in Manhattan for Warhol on April 1, 1987, at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York.

Warhol's will dictated that his entire estate – with the exception of a few modest legacies to family members – would go to create a foundation dedicated to the "advancement of the visual arts". Warhol had so many possessions that it took Sotheby's nine days to auction his estate after his death; the auction grossed more than US$20 million.

In 1987, in accordance with Warhol's will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts began. The Foundation serves as the official Estate of Andy Warhol, but also has a mission "to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process" and is "focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature."^[42]

The Artists Rights Society is the U.S. copyright representative for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for all Warhol works with the exception of Warhol film stills.^[43] The U.S. copyright representative for Warhol film stills is the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.^[44] Additionally, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has agreements in place for its image archive. All digital images of Warhol are exclusively managed by Corbis, while all transparency images of Warhol are managed by Art Resource.^[45]

The Andy Warhol Foundation released its 20th Anniversary Annual Report as a three-volume set in 2007: Vol. I, 1987–2007; Vol. II, Grants & Exhibitions; and Vol. III, Legacy Program.^[46] The Foundation remains one of the largest grant-giving organizations for the visual arts in the U.S.^[47]

Works[link]

Paintings[link]

By the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol had become a very successful commercial illustrator. His detailed and elegant drawings for I. Miller shoes were particularly popular. They consisted mainly of "blotted ink" drawings (or monoprints), a technique which he applied in much of his early art. Although many artists of this period worked in commercial art, most did so discreetly. Warhol was so successful, however, that his profile as an illustrator seemed to undermine his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist.

Pop art was an experimental form that several artists were independently adopting; some of these pioneers, such as Roy Lichtenstein, would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the "Pope of Pop", turned to this new style, where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists (such as Willem de Kooning). Warhol's first pop art paintings were displayed in April 1961, serving as the backdrop for New York Department Store Bronwit Teller's window display. This was the same stage his Pop Art contemporaries Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg had also once graced.^[48] Eventually, Warhol pared his image vocabulary down to the icon itself – to brand names, celebrities, dollar signs – and removed all traces of the artist's "hand" in the production of his paintings.

To him, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons were already being used by Lichtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns, and so on; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. It was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the ideas for both the soup cans and Warhol's dollar paintings. On November 23, 1961 Warhol wrote Latow a check for $50 which, according to the 2009 Warhol biography, Pop, The Genius of Warhol, was payment for coming up with the idea of the soup cans as subject matter.^[49] For his first major exhibition Warhol painted his famous cans of Campbell's Soup, which he claimed to have had for lunch for most of his life. The work sold for $10,000 at an auction on November 17, 1971, at Sotheby's New York – a minimal amount for the artist whose paintings sell for over $6 million more recently.^[50]

He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well. From these beginnings he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the hand-made from the artistic process. Warhol frequently used silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, following his directions to make different versions and variations.^[51]

In 1979, Warhol was commissioned by BMW to paint a Group 4 race version of the then elite supercar BMW M1 for the fourth installment in the BMW Art Car Project. Unlike the three artists before him, Warhol declined the use of a small scale practice model, instead opting to immediately paint directly onto the full scale automobile. It was indicated that Warhol spent only a total of 23 minutes to paint the entire car.^[52] Warhol produced both comic and serious works; his subject could be a soup can or an electric chair. Warhol used the same techniques– silkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colors – whether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes, and disasters, as in the 1962–63 Death and Disaster series. The Death and Disaster paintings included Red Car Crash, Purple Jumping Man, and Orange Disaster.

The unifying element in Warhol's work is his deadpan Keatonesque style – artistically and personally affectless. This was mirrored by Warhol's own demeanor, as he often played "dumb" to the media, and refused to explain his work. The artist was famous for having said that all you need to know about him and his works is already there, "Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."^[53]

His Rorschach inkblots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (literally, wallpaper with a cow motif) and his oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that was then oxidized with urine) are also noteworthy in this context. Equally noteworthy is the way these works – and their means of production – mirrored the atmosphere at Andy's New York "Factory". Biographer Bob Colacello provides some details on Andy's "piss paintings":

Victor... was Andy's ghost pisser on the Oxidations. He would come to the Factory to urinate on canvases that had already been primed with copper-based paint by Andy or Ronnie Cutrone, a second ghost pisser much appreciated by Andy, who said that the vitamin B that Ronnie took made a prettier color when the acid in the urine turned the copper green. Did Andy ever use his own urine? My diary shows that when he first began the series, in December 1977, he did, and there were many others: boys who'd come to lunch and drink too much wine, and find it funny or even flattering to be asked to help Andy 'paint.' Andy always had a little extra bounce in his walk as he led them to his studio.^[54]

Warhol's first portrait of Basquiat (1982) is a black photosilkscreen over an oxidized copper "piss painting".

After many years of silkscreen, oxidation, photography, etc., Warhol returned to painting with a brush in hand in a series of over 50 large collaborative works done with Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1984 and 1986.^[55][56] Despite negative criticism when these were first shown, Warhol called some of them "masterpieces," and they were influential for his later work.^[57]

The influence of the large collaborations with Basquiat can be seen in Warhol's The Last Supper cycle, his last and possibly his largest series, seen by some as "arguably his greatest,"^[58] but by others as “wishy-washy, religiose” and “spiritless."^[59] It is also the largest series of religious-themed works by any U.S. artist.^[58]

At the time of his death, Warhol was working on Cars, a series of paintings for Mercedes-Benz.^[60]

A self-portrait by Andy Warhol (1963–64), which sold in New York at the May Post-War and Contemporary evening sale in Christie's, fetched $38.4 million.^[61]

On May 9, 2012, his classic painting "Double Elvis (Ferus Type)" sold at auction at Sotheby's in New York for US$33 million dollars. With commission, the sale price totaled US$37,042,500, short of the $50 million that Sotheby's had predicted the painting might bring. The piece (silkscreen ink and spray paint on canvas) shows Elvis Presley in a gunslinger pose. It was first exhibited in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Warhol made 22 versions of the "Double Elvis," nine of which are held in museums.^[62]

Films[link]

Warhol worked across a wide range of media – painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than 60 films,^[63] plus some 500 short black-and-white "screen test" portraits of Factory visitors.^[64] One of his most famous films, Sleep, monitors poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. The 35-minute film Blow Job is one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter supposedly receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to see this. Another, Empire (1964), consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. The film Eat consists of a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes. Warhol attended the 1962 premiere of the static composition by LaMonte Young called Trio for Strings and subsequently created his famous series of static films including Kiss, Eat, and Sleep (for which Young initially was commissioned to provide music). Uwe Husslein cites filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the Trio premiere, and who claims Warhol's static films were directly inspired by the performance.^[65]

Batman Dracula is a 1964 film that was produced and directed by Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics. It was screened only at his art exhibits. A fan of the Batman series, Warhol's movie was an "homage" to the series, and is considered the first appearance of a blatantly campy Batman. The film was until recently thought to have been lost, until scenes from the picture were shown at some length in the 2006 documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis.

Warhol's 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film Camp.

His most popular and critically successful film was Chelsea Girls (1966). The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mm-films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silk-screen works of the early 1960s.

Other important films include Bike Boy, My Hustler, and Lonesome Cowboys, a raunchy pseudo-western. These and other titles document gay underground and camp culture, and continue to feature prominently in scholarship about sexuality and art.^[66][67] Blue Movie – a film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the film's playing-time – was Warhol's last film as director. The film was at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter. For many years Viva refused to allow it to be screened. It was publicly screened in New York in 2005 for the first time in over thirty years.

After his June 3, 1968, shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat. All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films starred Joe Dallesandro – more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.

In the early 1970s, most of the films directed by Warhol were pulled out of circulation by Warhol and the people around him who ran his business. After Warhol's death, the films were slowly restored by the Whitney Museum and are occasionally projected at museums and film festivals. Few of the Warhol-directed films are available on video or DVD.

Factory in New York[link]

• Factory: 1342 Lexington Avenue (the first Factory)
• The Factory: 231 East 47th street 1963–1967 (the building no longer exists)
• Factory: 33 Union Square 1967–1973 (Decker Building)
• Factory: 860 Broadway (near 33 Union Square) 1973–1984 (the building has now been completely remodeled and was for a time (2000–2001) the headquarters of the dot-com consultancy Scient)
• Factory: 22 East 33rd Street 1984–1987 (the building no longer exists)
• Home: 1342 Lexington Avenue
• Home: 57 East 66th street (Warhol's last home)
• Last personal studio: 158 Madison Avenue

Filmography[link]

Music[link]

In the mid 1960s, Warhol adopted the band the Velvet Underground, making them a crucial element of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia performance art show. Warhol, with Paul Morrissey, acted as the band's manager, introducing them to Nico (who would perform with the band at Warhol's request). In 1966 he "produced" their first album The Velvet Underground & Nico, as well as providing its album art. His actual participation in the album's production amounted to simply paying for the studio time. After the band's first album, Warhol and band leader Lou Reed started to disagree more about the direction the band should take, and their artistic friendship ended.^{[citation needed]} In 1989, after Warhol's death, Reed and John Cale re-united for the first time since 1972 to write, perform, record and release the concept album Songs for Drella, a tribute to Warhol.

Warhol designed many album covers for various artists starting with the photographic cover of John Wallowitch's debut album, This Is John Wallowitch!!! (1964). He designed the cover art for the Rolling Stones albums Sticky Fingers (1971) and Love You Live (1977), and the John Cale albums The Academy in Peril (1972) and Honi Soit in 1981. In 1975, Warhol was commissioned to do several portraits of Mick Jagger, and in 1982 he designed the album cover for the Diana Ross album Silk Electric.^{[citation needed]} One of his last works was a portrait of Aretha Franklin for the cover of her 1986 gold album Aretha, which was done in the style of the Reigning Queens series he had completed the year before.^[68]

Warhol strongly influenced the New Wave/punk rock band Devo, as well as David Bowie. Bowie recorded a song called "Andy Warhol" for his 1971 album Hunky Dory. Lou Reed wrote the song "Andy's Chest", about Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Warhol, in 1968. He recorded it with the Velvet Underground, and this version was released on the VU album in 1985.

Books and print[link]

Beginning in the early 1950s, Warhol produced several unbound portfolios of his work.

The first of several bound self-published books by Warhol was 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, printed in 1954 by Seymour Berlin on Arches brand watermarked paper using his blotted line technique for the lithographs. The original edition was limited to 190 numbered, hand colored copies, using Dr. Martin's ink washes. Most of these were given by Warhol as gifts to clients and friends. Copy No. 4, inscribed "Jerry" on the front cover and given to Geraldine Stutz, was used for a facsimile printing in 1987^[69] and the original was auctioned in May 2006 for US $35,000 by Doyle New York.^[70]

Other self-published books by Warhol include:

• A Gold Book
• Wild Raspberries
• Holy Cats

After gaining fame, Warhol "wrote" several books that were commercially published:

• a, A Novel (1968, ISBN 0-8021-3553-6) is a literal transcription– containing spelling errors and phonetically written background noise and mumbling– of audio recordings of Ondine and several of Andy Warhol's friends hanging out at the Factory, talking, going out.^{[citation needed]}
• The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975, ISBN 0-15-671720-4)– according to Pat Hackett's introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, Pat Hackett did the transcriptions and text for the book based on daily phone conversations, sometimes (when Warhol was traveling) using audio cassettes that Andy Warhol gave her. Said cassettes contained conversations with Brigid Berlin (also known as Brigid Polk) and former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello.^{[citation needed]}
• Popism: The Warhol 1960s (1980, ISBN 0-15-672960-1), authored by Warhol and Pat Hackett is a retrospective view of the 1960s and the role of pop art.
• The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989, ISBN 0-446-39138-7), edited by Pat Hackett, is a diary dictated by Warhol to Hackett in daily phone conversations. Warhol started the diary to keep track of his expenses after being audited, although it soon evolved to include his personal and cultural observations.^[71]

Warhol created the fashion magazine Interview that is still published today. The loopy title script on the cover is thought to be either his own handwriting or that of his mother, Julia Warhola, who would often do text work for his early commercial pieces.^[72]

Other media[link]

Although Andy Warhol is most known for his paintings and films, he authored works in many different media.

• Drawing: Warhol started his career as a commercial illustrator, producing drawings in "blotted-ink" style for advertisements and magazine articles. Best known of these early works are his drawings of shoes. Some of his personal drawings were self-published in small booklets, such as Yum, Yum, Yum (about food), Ho, Ho, Ho (about Christmas) and (of course) Shoes, Shoes, Shoes. His most artistically acclaimed book of drawings is probably A Gold Book, compiled of sensitive drawings of young men. A Gold Book is so named because of the gold leaf that decorates its pages.^[73] In April 2012 a sketch of 1930s singer Rudy Vallee thought to be drawn by Andy Warhol was found at a Las Vegas garage sale. The image is believed to have been drawn when Andy was 9 or 10.^[74]
• Sculpture: Warhol's most famous sculpture is probably his Brillo Boxes, silkscreened ink on wood replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes (designed by James Harvey), part of a series of "grocery carton" sculptures that also included Heinz ketchup and Campbell's tomato juice cases.^[75] Other famous works include the Silver Clouds– helium filled, silver mylar, pillow-shaped balloons. A Silver Cloud was included in the traveling exhibition Air Art (1968–69) curated by Willoughby Sharp. Clouds was also adapted by Warhol for avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham's dance piece RainForest (1968).^[76]
• Audio: At one point Warhol carried a portable recorder with him wherever he went, taping everything everybody said and did. He referred to this device as his "wife". Some of these tapes were the basis for his literary work. Another audio-work of Warhol's was his "Invisible Sculpture", a presentation in which burglar alarms would go off when entering the room. Warhol's cooperation with the musicians of The Velvet Underground was driven by an expressed desire to become a music producer.^{[citation needed]}
• Time Capsules: In 1973, Warhol began saving ephemera from his daily life– correspondence, newspapers, souvenirs, childhood objects, even used plane tickets and food– which was sealed in plain cardboard boxes dubbed Time Capsules. By the time of his death, the collection grew to include 600, individually dated "capsules". The boxes are now housed at the Andy Warhol Museum.^[77]
• Television: Andy Warhol dreamed of a television show that he wanted to call The Nothing Special, a special about his favorite subject: Nothing. Later in his career he did create two cable television shows, Andy Warhol's TV in 1982 and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes (based on his famous "fifteen minutes of fame" quotation) for MTV in 1986. Besides his own shows he regularly made guest appearances on other programs, including The Love Boat wherein a Midwestern wife (Marion Ross) fears Andy Warhol will reveal to her husband (Tom Bosley, who starred alongside Ross in sitcom Happy Days) her secret past as a Warhol superstar named Marina del Rey. Warhol also produced a TV commercial for Schrafft's Restaurants in New York City, for an ice cream dessert appropriately titled the "Underground Sundae".^[78]
• Fashion: Warhol is quoted for having said: "I'd rather buy a dress and put it up on the wall, than put a painting, wouldn't you?"^{[cite this quote]} One of his most well-known Superstars, Edie Sedgwick, aspired to be a fashion designer, and his good friend Halston was a famous one. Warhol's work in fashion includes silkscreened dresses, a short sub-career as a catwalk-model and books on fashion as well as paintings with fashion (shoes) as a subject.^{[citation needed]}
• Performance Art: Warhol and his friends staged theatrical multimedia happenings at parties and public venues, combining music, film, slide projections and even Gerard Malanga in an S&M outfit cracking a whip. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 was the culmination of this area of his work.^[79]
• Theater: Andy Warhol's Pork opened on May 5, 1971 at LaMama theater in New York for a two-week run and was brought to the Roundhouse in London for a longer run in August 1971. Pork was based on tape-recorded conversations between Brigin Berlin and Andy during which Brigid would play for Andy tapes she had made of phone conversations between herself and her mother, socialite Honey Berlin. The play featured Jayne County as "Vulva" and Cherry Vanilla as "Amanda Pork".^{[citation needed]} In 1974, Andy Warhol also produced the stage musical Man On The Moon, which was written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
• Photography: To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. Warhol was an accomplished photographer, and took an enormous amount of photographs of Factory visitors, friends.^{[citation needed]}
• Computer: Warhol used Amiga computers to generate digital art, which he helped design and build with Amiga, Inc. He also displayed the difference between slow fill and fast fill on live TV with Debbie Harry as a model.^[80] (video)

Producer and product[link]

Warhol had assistance in producing his paintings. This is also true of his film-making and commercial enterprises.^{[citation needed]}

He founded the gossip magazine Interview, a stage for celebrities he "endorsed" and a business staffed by his friends. He collaborated with others on all of his books (some of which were written with Pat Hackett.) He adopted the young painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the band The Velvet Underground, presenting them to the public as his latest interest, and collaborating with them. One might even say that he produced people (as in the Warholian "Superstar" and the Warholian portrait). He endorsed products, appeared in commercials, and made frequent celebrity guest appearances on television shows and in films (he appeared in everything from Love Boat to Saturday Night Live and the Richard Pryor movie, Dynamite Chicken).^{[citation needed]}

In this respect Warhol was a fan of "Art Business" and "Business Art"– he, in fact, wrote about his interest in thinking about art as business in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again.^{[citation needed]}

Personal life[link]

Sexuality[link]

Warhol was gay.^[81][82] When interviewed in 1980, he indicated that he was still a virgin – biographer Bob Colacello who was present at the interview felt it was probably true and that what little sex he had was probably "a mixture of voyeurism and masturbation – to use his [Andy's] word abstract".^[83] Warhol's assertion of virginity would seem to be contradicted by an incident recounted by one biographer, his hospital treatment in 1960 for condylomota, a sexually transmitted disease.^[84] The fact that Warhol's homosexuality influenced his work and shaped his relationship to the art world is a major subject of scholarship on the artist and is an issue that Warhol himself addressed in interviews, in conversation with his contemporaries, and in his publications (e.g. Popism: The Warhol 1960s). Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works (portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, and films like Blow Job, My Hustler and Lonesome Cowboys) draw from gay underground culture and/or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. As has been addressed by a range of scholars, many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters.^[85] The first works that he submitted to a fine art gallery, homoerotic drawings of male nudes, were rejected for being too openly gay.^[86] In Popism, furthermore, the artist recalls a conversation with the film maker Emile de Antonio about the difficulty Warhol had being accepted socially by the then more famous (but closeted) gay artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. De Antonio explained that Warhol was "too swish and that upsets them." In response to this, Warhol writes, "There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all the things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I 'should' want to change... Other people could change their attitudes but not me".^[87][88] In exploring Warhol's biography, many turn to this period – the late 1950s and early 1960s – as a key moment in the development of his persona. Some have suggested that his frequent refusal to comment on his work, to speak about himself (confining himself in interviews to responses like "Um, no" and "Um, yes", and often allowing others to speak for him) – and even the evolution of his pop style – can be traced to the years when Warhol was first dismissed by the inner circles of the New York art world.^[89]

Religious beliefs[link]

Warhol was a practicing Ruthenian Rite Catholic. He regularly volunteered at homeless shelters in New York, particularly during the busier times of the year, and described himself as a religious person.^[91] Many of Warhol's later works depicted religious subjects, including two series, Details of Renaissance Paintings (1984) and The Last Supper (1986). In addition, a body of religious-themed works was found posthumously in his estate.^[91]

During his life, Warhol regularly attended Mass, and the priest at Warhol's church, Saint Vincent Ferrer, said that the artist went there almost daily,^[91] although he was not observed taking communion or going to confession and sat or knelt in the pews at the back".^[83] The priest thought he was afraid of being recognized; Warhol said he was self-conscious about being seen in a Latin Rite church crossing himself "in the Orthodox way" (right to left instead of the reverse).^[83]

His art is noticeably influenced by the eastern Christian iconographic tradition which was so evident in his places of worship.^[91]

Warhol's brother has described the artist as "really religious, but he didn't want people to know about that because [it was] private". Despite the private nature of his faith, in Warhol's eulogy John Richardson depicted it as devout: "To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew's studies for the priesthood".^[91]

Dedicated museums and collections[link]

Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce.

Two museums are dedicated to Warhol. The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, is located at 117 Sandusky Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the largest American art museum dedicated to a single artist, holding more than 12,000 works by the artist.^{[citation needed]}

The other museum is the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, established in 1991 by Warhol's brother John Warhola, the Slovak Ministry of Culture, and the Warhol Foundation in New York. It is located in the small town of Medzilaborce, Slovakia. Warhol's parents and his two eldest brothers were born 15 kilometres away in the village of Miková. The museum houses several originals donated mainly by the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York and also personal items donated by Warhol's relatives.^[92]

Jose Mugrabi owns the world's largest private collection of Warhol paintings.^[93]

Movies about Warhol[link]

Warhol (right) with director Ulli Lommel on the set of 1979's Cocaine Cowboys, in which Warhol appeared as himself

Dramatic portrayals

In 1979, Warhol appeared as himself in the film Cocaine Cowboys.^[94]

After his death, Warhol was portrayed by Crispin Glover in Oliver Stone's film The Doors (1991), by David Bowie in Basquiat, a film by Julian Schnabel, and by Jared Harris in the film I Shot Andy Warhol directed by Mary Harron (1996). Warhol appears as a character in Michael Daugherty's 1997 opera Jackie O. Actor Mark Bringleson makes a brief cameo as Warhol in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). Many films by avant-garde cineast Jonas Mekas have caught the moments of Andy's life. Sean Gregory Sullivan depicted Warhol in the 1998 film 54. Guy Pearce portrayed Warhol in the 2007 film, Factory Girl, about Edie Sedgwick's life.^[95] Actor Greg Travis portrays Warhol in a brief scene from the 2009 film Watchmen. The 2012 film Men in Black III features Bill Hader as Andy Warhol as undercover MIB Agent W who is at a party in 1969 greeted by MIB Agents K and J (J from the future).

Gus Van Sant was planning a version of Warhol's life with River Phoenix in the lead role just before Phoenix's death in 1993.^[96]

Documentaries

• The 2001 documentary, Absolut Warhola was produced by Polish director Stanislaw Mucha, featuring Warhol's parents' family and hometown in Slovakia.^[97]
• Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film is a reverential four-hour 2006 movie by Ric Burns.^[98]
• Andy Warhol: Double Denied is a 52 minute movie by lan Yentob about the difficulties in authenticating Warhol's work.^[99]
• Andy Warhol's People Factory, a three-part 2008 television documentary directed by Catherine Shorr, features interviews with several of Warhol's associates.^[100][101]

See also[link]

Biography portal

• Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board
• Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000
• Andy Warhol Bridge in Pittsburgh.
• Bodley Gallery
• 15 minutes of fame
• Moon Museum
• Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York City

References[link]