This study is on Andy warhol who has established a creative form of portraits, using popular songwriters' pictures from the 1950s to 1960s which saw accommodation, nonindividuality and opening of popular culture as a representative trend. A French art...
This study is on Andy warhol who has established a creative form of portraits, using popular songwriters' pictures from the 1950s to 1960s which saw accommodation, nonindividuality and opening of popular culture as a representative trend. A French art historian, Pierre Francastel said that arts form a unique sphere in an era or a world. It means arts have essential relevance to society and that modern arts are closely connected with our society in that the modern human society in which we live is controlled by popular culture. Popular arts deal with these popular images which are absorbed into arts.
Andy warhol was borne by a poor immigrant worker. At first he started as a commercial artist. In the early pop arts, he got in the limelight as a pop artist, intensively drawing famous brand-name such as bottles of coke, Kempbell soap cans, and Brillo boxes, or items in supermarkets. He exploited a commercial skill-silk screen- in the making of his works so as to be designed matching industrial society. And he accomplished integration between photos and paintings, applying the former as they were to the latter. In the form of making, repeating a unit of image symmetrically or continuously, he made his works themselves have impersonal, universal, and mechanical characteristics. All these features were reflected well on his portraits.
Unlike the portraits regarded best in the past which were able to not only draw figures realistically as they stood, but also show mind and nature of the objects altogether, his portraits ventured his own unique formula and technique. Consequently, his self-portraits with the suggestion of only a transient, virtual image, alienated themselves from the conventional conception of portraits. And celebrities' images he dealt with as he envied stars, were copied with a great magnitude, selected from the photos in newspapers and magazines through the way of silk screen. He hired assistants and accept others' ideas positively to make work as easy as he could.
In conclusion, his portraits challenged a variety of traditional conception of arts: in other words, the way of manual making of arts, noble prestige for artists and regulatory modes. And he got rid of freshness by reproducing a subject's image with these techniques and modes. It informed one that a unique piece of work didn't have a meaning any longer and that e lived in the era of production and duplication.