Andy Warhol
It is rare for an artist to become a celebrity, but Andy Warhol experienced much more than his fifteen minutes of fame and became an icon of his generation. Warhol was involved in many artistic fields that included painting, filmmaking, publisher, record producer, and photography, but at the same time he was a businessman, social commentator and self-promoter. He was a major contributor to the Pop Art movement, a period when mainstream objects such as comic strips, advertisements, and celebrity photos, were incorporated into many works. Warhol's "Campbell Soup" series and later his "Celebrity" series are some of the most well known works of Pop Art that are still used in print and advertising today. However, not all of his works dealt with intriguing celebrities or mainstream advertising. Scores of artists have revealed more than one side of their persona and Warhol had an area within himself that was different than the bulk of his visual output that seemed a bit morbid. Warhol's darker side is evident in his "Death and Disaster" series. This was a period in which he related such tragedies as car accidents, suicide, capital punishment, and gang warfare that seems to be more than a passing inte
In 1967 he produced "Big Electric Chair" which differed from the previous piece in many ways. His work did not begin to be noticed until around 1962 when his "Campbell Soup" prints and "Marilyn Monroe" silk screens grabbed the interest of the art world. The "Electric Chair" series shows a side of Warhol not seen in his most popular works. The ";Electric Chair" was created the next year in 1964; the piece shows an image of the unoccupied chair with the word "silence" strategically placed in the top right hand corner. He condemns capital punishment by applying the opinion that the prisoner seems like the victim. However this period was a difficult time in Warhol's life. Few people ever see what an execution chamber actually looks like, and with Warhol making this setting as dark as possible, he makes a very powerful and lasting statement. In Andy Warhol's "Electric Chair" series, which was a part of his "Death and Disaster" period, the pieces were quite different from the original in a variety of ways, however the theme and ideas behind the series remains true to the original. In this version, he focused in on the chair itself instead of the whole chamber. The Sing Sing electric chair had been the world's most infamous fryer, with a total of 614 inmates being put to death by the end of its use. This work possibly gives the general view of a condemned prisoner walking into execution chamber and viewing the instrument of his death. These series of prints were the conclusion to Warhol's original electric chair. This time there is much less background giving the impression that someone might be in the room. Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 with a degree in pictorial design.
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Acceptance Essays
