Mixed Media #22...Andy Warhol

reflections on a great American artist

Andy Warhol, Stockholm, 1968. Lasse Olsson / Pressens bild, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

WHAT’S YOUR favourite artwork by Andy Warhol? Do you have one? Wherever you think he sits in the league table of the most famous artists he was so prolific, his work so varied, that I imagine there must be something in it that you like. Of course I may be wrong.

Born Andrew Warhola Jr. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928 to immigrant parents, he showed early artistic talent. By happy coincidence the Pittsburgh public school system specialised in teaching art, and Andy attended the Carnegie Museum course at the age of nine. One of his teachers there, Joseph Fitzpatrick, said of him:

A more talented person than Andy Warhol I never knew. He was magnificently talented. Personally not attractive, and a little bit obnoxious. He had no consideration for other people…He was socially inept at the time and showed little or no appreciation for anything. He was not pleasant with the members of his class or with any of the people with whom he associated. Maybe he was withdrawn because of his lack of social background and developed the approach to cover. But he did seem to have a goal from the very start.¹

An early indication of how the young Warhol would later take the 1960s New York art scene by storm, and in time capture the attention of the art world in general.