Virtual Art Tour

Andy Warhol, American, 1930 - 1987

Jimmy Carter

Perhaps the best known of the Pop artists, Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Pop Art movement began in the mid 1950’s and ended in the early 1960’s. Warhol worked as an advertising illustrator in the 1950’s and made his debut as a painter in 1962 when he presented his “Campbell Soup Can,” probably his most well known artwork. In the 1960’s he tried to create artwork that held no real emotional or social content utilizing images of everyday objects, labels, and comic strips. Warhol felt that painting was outmoded and limiting and began to create his images in the silkscreen process. This allowed him to mass-produce his imagery, utilizing media imagery and processes to create repetition, which he believed drained many images of all of their emotional content. From 1966 to 1972 Warhol devoted his time to making films such as Kiss, Empire, Sleep, and Chelsea Girls, in which he allowed the actor to improvise before an immobile camera and to managing a rock band and discotheque. During the 1970’s he created series of pictures and portraits of celebrities and friends. Warhol was also known for his constant presence on the social scene and his eccentric impersonal personality. For this inauguration piece, Warhol sent two of his assistants to the inauguration to take photographs, which he later worked from in his studio.