Warhol — A life of Controversy
Andy Warhol was an American artist, producer and director who was lauded as a leading figure in ‘pop art’, which was a visual art moment of the 1960s. As a teen, Warhol won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. After graduating from high school, his intentions were to study art education at the University of Pittsburgh in the hope of becoming an art teacher, but his plans changed and he enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he studied commercial art.
Warhol began diverting more attention to painting in the late 1950s, and in 1961, he premiered the concept of “pop art” — paintings that focused on commercial goods that were mass-produced. Museum of Modern Art of New York City hosted a conference on ‘pop art’ in December 1962 during which artists such as Warhol were attacked for giving way to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol’s open embrace of market culture. This conference set the tone for Warhol’s reception..
On June 3, 1968, radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas shot Warhol at his studio. She authored in 1967 the ‘S.C.U.M. Manifesto’, a separatist feminist monograph that promoted purging of men; and starred in Warhol’s 1968 film ‘I, a Man’. Solanas was arrested the day after the assault; she said that Warhol “had too much control over my life.” She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to three years under the control of Department of Corrections. Warhol was fatally injured and barely survived; surgeons cut his chest open and stimulated his heart’s movement. He suffered physical effects for life, including being required to wear a surgical corset.
In 1979, critics despised his display of portraits of 1970s famous personalities, calling them commercial and superficial. By the 1980s, Warhol was being criticized for becoming merely a ‘business artist’.
Warhol was gay; interviewed in 1980, he indicated that he was still a virgin but his assertion of virginity is contradicted by his lovers and also by his hospital treatment in 1960 for condylomata, a sexually transmitted disease. Warhol’s initial works submitted to a fine art gallery, homoerotic sketches of male nudes, were dismissed for being too openly gay. During his career, Warhol created erotic photography and sketches of male nudes. Many of his most famous works were portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, and films such as Blow Job, My Hustler and Lonesome Cowboys drawn from gay underground culture, openly exploring the complexity of sexuality and desire. Visit websites like BlouinArtinfo.com and Artsy.net for checking out his works.
Warhol died on February 22, 1987, after suffering postoperative complications from a routine gall bladder procedure. His family sued the hospital for inadequate care and the malpractice case was quickly settled out of court; Warhol’s family received an undisclosed sum of money.
