The Warhol Look - Glamour, Style, Fashion presents a bold new
look at Andy Warhol by examining the artists fascination with glamour,
style and fashionability. Going behind the famous pop-art world Warhol
inhabited, it investigates the full range of Warhols work and reveals how
the Warhol style has influenced contemporary artists as well as the
fashion designers, photographers and video makers of today.
Arguably the most influential artist of the second half of the 20th century,
Warhol worked across many artistic fields - controversial pop artist,
illustrator, photographer, film producer, publisher, costume designer and
painter - he became a cultural phenomenon and icon for his time.
The Warhol Look - Glamour, Style, Fashion examines Warhols career
through seven profusely illustrative phases entitled Hollywood Glamour,
The 1950s, Window Display, Silver Factory Style/The 1960s, Drag &
Transformation, Interview - the magazine he founded in 1969 - and
Uptown/Downtown Style. It includes over 500 objects from the The Andy
Warhol Museum, its archive and other international collections. Paintings,
costumes, photography, period magazines, reconstructed window displays,
film, video and authentic -Warholiana- feature everything from the faux to
the fashionable to the fantastic.
From his childhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 1930s, when he
collected Hollywood fan magazines and signed publicity photographs of
child stars such as Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney who were his
contemporaries , Andy Warhol was obsessed with glamour, style and
fashionability. The son of working class immigrants from the Carpathian
Mountains, Warhol was encouraged by his mother to pursue his artistic
interests. A love of drawing, painting, cutting designs from paper and
reading led him to enrol in free Saturday classes in studio art and art
appreciation at the nearby Carnegie Institute of Technology.
At the age of 17 he enrolled in the Institutes College of Fine Arts where he
majored in pictorial design. During his summer holidays, he worked as a
window dresser at Hornes department store and studied fashion
magazines; he also taught part-time at the Irene Kaufman Settlement.
Warhol left Pennsylvania for Manhattan, New York a week after he
graduated and within three months had a brilliant career as a commercial
artist.
The distance between working class Pittsburgh and glitzy New York must
have seemed insurmountable, but Warhol, more than any other artist, came
to understand how insignificant this distance could be.
In 1985 he commented: Everybody has
their own America and then they have
pieces of fantasy America that they think
is out there but they cant see. When I
was little, I never left Pennsylvania and I
used to have fantasies about things that I
thought were happening ........ that I felt I
was missing out on. But you can only
live life in one place at a time.... You live
in your dream America that youve
custom-made from art and schmaltz and
emotions just as much as you live in
your real one.
Warhol continued his commercial
display work in New York right through
the 1950s with windows (on Dior for
example) which were in keeping with his
popular style of illustration. Breaking
with this style in 1961 he created a
window for Bonwit Teller in which he
introduced his new Pop paintings as an
ultra-contemporary backdrop. Gene
Moore, at Bonwit Teller and Tiffanys,
often hired artists to create window
displays, and Warhol as well as Jasper
Johns, James Rosenquist and Robert
Rauschenberg all experimented with this
form of commercial work early in their careers. But unlike his
contemporaries, Warhol remained intrigued by window display long after
he achieved recognition as a fine artist.
Looking at store windows is great entertainment because you can see all
of these things and be really glad its not home filling up your closets and
drawers, wrote Warhol.
By the 1960s Warhol had collected large groups of press and publicity
photographs of stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor and
had hoarded piles of fan magazines and tabloid newspapers, as well as
memorabilia such as the dress worn by Jean Harlow and the shoes by
Clark Gable that are included in this exhibition. From these he culled the
images that would become the source for his paintings and prints of
Marilyn, and Liz, which later inspired designer Gianni Versace to give
Hollywood glamour physical form in his lavish Marilyn and Liz
clothing. Through these star portraits, which have retained an enduring
potency, Warhol synthesised our cultures desire for a glamorous ideal.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol and his entourage were a prominent
feature in the new York nightclub scene. These clubs were magnets for the
periods trendsetters, attracting artists and fashionable society from uptown
and downtown, the establishment and the avant-garde. Participating in the
worlds of fashion and glamour more actively than ever before, Warhol
frequented the uptown club, Studio 54, with his friends Liza Minnelli and
Bianca Jagger; regularly attended fashion shows by Valentino, Versace,
Gaultier and others; and mingled in the downtown scene with artists such
as Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. He created T-Shirts, sneakers and scarves
with his own images and, in the mid-1980s, he collaborated with designer
Stephen Sprouse to create a line of clothing based on his camouflage
paintings.
Throughout this time,
Warhol was drawn both to
the flamboyant subculture
of drag and attracted by the
idea of personal
transformation. During the
1960s, he filmed
outrageous performances
by Jack Smith and Mario
Montez, and the
transvestites Candy
Darling and Holly
Woodlawn, and in the
1970s he created a series
of black and Hispanic drag
queens with the punning
title Ladies and Gentlemen.
His early 1960s paintings
Wigs and Before and After
and the diamond-dusted
Shoes paintings of the
1980s may be seen
simultaneously as
explorations, tributes and
send-ups of drag and
personal transformation.
Warhols own transformations were clearly visible in his dress. He began
to physically transform himself in the 1950s when he had cosmetic surgery
on his nose and first wore a hairpiece to cover his advancing baldness. His
wigs grew ever bolder, culminating with the hard-to-miss shock of white
hair that seemed like a fashion accessory, while in 1981, he used heavy
make-up and array of wigs to transform himself into a variety of
near-female personae, expressing the close connection between
beautification, reinvention, transformation and drag.
Interview represents the pinnacle of the artists infatuation with glamour,
style and fashion. Originally a monthly film journal, it quickly expanded to
encompass all areas of popular art and culture. An amalgam of tabloid
newspaper, fan magazine and art journal, Interview pioneered the concept of
the celebrity interview with prominent personalities interviewing other ones
in an intimate conversational style.
Warhols portrait paintings, photographs and video work provide a vivid
picture of the worlds in which he moved in the 1970s and 1980s. He
photographed the scene incessantly, just as he himself was frequently
photographed, and became increasingly involved in video production. His
innovative cable television series Fashion, Andy Warhols TV and Andy
Warhols Fifteen Minutes covered everything from haute couture to punk.
In what might appear the ultimate seduction of the fashion world, Warhol
himself became a model. The artists last public appearance, only a few
days before his death in February 1987, was a model for a fashion show in
downtown Manhattan.
Throughout this period, Warhol served as
a constant conduit of ideas among the
diverse worlds he inhabited. Only now by
looking back at the whole range of
Warhols work are we beginning to see
that his fascination with glamour, style
and fashion was not a distraction from
his real work, or a debasement of the
rarefied, pure world of contemporary art,
but an integral part of his multivalent life
and work. It was also a complex and
productive response to the tensions
between art, popular culture and daily life.
Related Links: