Probably the most famous member of Pittsburgh’s GLBT community was Andy Warhol. Since 2008 marks the city’s 250th birthday (and what would be Andy’s 80th), it seems appropriate to take a moment to reflect on his life and contributions.
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6,1928, the third child of Andrej and Julia Warhola, two Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants who settled in Pittsburgh. They were a working class family who lived primarily in Oakland and worshipped at St John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Andrej worked as a construction laborer and Julie sold homemade paper flowers door-to-door.
But young Andy always dreamed of something more, starting when he was just six and began collecting autographed photos of movie stars like Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple. This interest in celebrity would eventually become a cornerstone of his art, something his family (especially mother Julia) supported. Sadly, Andrej would never see his son’s success: he died from tuberculosis peritonitis when Andy was just 13 years old. Fortunately, Julia would live to take pride in her son’s accomplishments, living with him for a while in New York before returning to Pittsburgh where she died in 1972.
Andy studied in commercial art at what is now Carnegie-Mellon University and developed more skills while creating window displays for the Joseph Horne Company department store. During the 1950s, after his move to New York, he became known in the advertising world for his whimsical drawings of shoes, which were done in a loose, blotted ink style. They would even be put on public display in one of Warhol’s first gallery shows. RCA Records hired him as a free-lance graphic artist, designing cover albums and related marketing materials. It was during this time when he dropped the “a” from Warhola and simply became Andy Warhol.
This exposure to the capitalism of art, would be a key factor in finding Warhol’s artistic vision. As he wrote in 1975, “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 Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke that 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, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
That vision started to blossom in the 1960s, when he founded his famous “Factory” to create both original and mass-produced art which would make him both rich and famous. At this studio, Warhol gathered around him an eclectic mixture of creative people, from musicians and crossdressers to major celebrities. It was during this era that he created his famous paintings of actors Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Troy Donahue, among others. And, perhaps his most famous works, paintings of ordinary products like Campbell soup cans.
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But not everyone who came into the Factory’s wonderfully bohemian atmosphere hoped to create art or to schmooze: three times in the 1960s people with guns would come into the Factory to threaten someone or something. Most famously was the incident in 1968 when a wouldbe performer named Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol.
Warhol was one of a burgeoning group of young artists creating what would be dubbed “pop art,” after a famous 1962 symposium atthe Museum of Modern Art in New York. An equally famous exhibit occurred at Paul Bianchini’s New York gallery in 1964. “The American Supermarket,” recreated a typical grocery store through paintings of everything from sales posters to produce.
At the Factory, Warhol dabbled in almost anything film and the burgeoning new technology called video tape. He wrote books and co-founded the magazine Interview. He became a popular member of New York’s nightlife from the 1960s through the 1980s, regularly attending such famous clubs as Studio 54.
He seldom spoke about his sexuality, but it was never really hidden. Warhol often created erotic drawings or even photos of nude men and made short films with homoerotic context like “Lonesome Cowboys”.
Critics often called Warhol’s work too commercial, even a few calling it a “hoax”. But Warhol proudly defended his revolutionary blend of art with the commercial, saying “making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.”
Warhol continued to work throughout his life. In 1987, he died from a heart attack following what should have been routine gall bladder surgery in New York. His death made world-wide news and an estimated 2,000 people attended his funeral in Pittsburgh.
Only seven years after his death, in 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh. It is the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist. It holds more than 12,000 works created by Warhol in media as varied as paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installation pieces, short films and videos. Its mission is to be “a vital forum in which diverse audiences of artists, scholars and the general public are galvanized through creative interactions with the art and life of Andy Warhol” and other contemporary artists.
To learn more about the museum, visit www.warhol.org.
