Style

“Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody.
Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things.”

Warhol’s art encompassed many forms of media, hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film and music. Warhol’s style was known as pop art; which illustrates the relationship of artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertisement. Warhol was an early adopter of silkscreen printmaking process as a technique for making paintings. The earliest silk-screening in painting would involve hand drawn images. This soon developed into photographically derived silk-screen paintings.

His work as a commercial artist and fine artist shows that unintentional marks and smudges were tolerated. Both his commercial and fine art endeavors were often full of imperfections such as smudges and smears. In the 70’s Warhol devoted most of his time to finding well off  celebrities that he would do portrait commissions of such as Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Diana Rose, to name a few. In the 80’s Warhol’s reemergence of critical and financial success in the 80’s was due to his affiliation and friendship with prolifically younger artists. They were dominating the New York art scene. All of Warhol’s work from the 70’s was starting to cause criticism and that he was becoming a business artist. The reviewers in 1979 disliked the exhibits and portraits of the 1970’s personalities and celebrities. They called them superficial, facile and commercial with no depth or indication of significance of the subject. The fact that Warhol was a homosexual also influenced his work and shaped his relationship to the art world is a major subject of scholarship on the artist.

The colour palette used by Warhol was bright colour no matter if it was a painting of a celebrity or a car crash. He would also use softer pastel colours and blacks for shadows to contrast the main vivid colours that made his art pop.

                In his final years Warhol pioneered in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1984. When Warhol died he was working on ‘Cars’, a series of painting for Mercedes-Benz.