Andy Warhol

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It would be hard to overestimate the importance that Andy Warhol and his work have for the contemporary visual arts. His work addresses and indeed embodies most of the major themes and dilemmas that confront modern artists.

These might be briefly described as: the role of popular culture and the mass media, the significance of the reproduced image, the nature of fame, celebrity and glamour, issues of sexuality, gender and representation, and not least, irony.

He is by any reckoning a ‘Pop Artist’. His paintings of soup cans and Coke bottles, of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, of car crashes and electric chairs, provide some of the most distinctive and identifiable images in Pop Art*, and have done so since the early 1960s.

≡ A twentieth-century art movement that takes us images from consumerism, the mass media and popular culture, and simultaneously subverts and celebrates them.

Yet he now appears to be an artist of much wider and greater significance than the term ‘Pop Art’ suggests. He also belongs, at least in part, to a number of other artistic traditions: Minimalism¹, Dadaism², conceptual art³, and above all portraiture, not least self-portraiture.

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