080055 PS Case Study II/III: Andy Warhol (2025W)

If Pop Art in the 1960s did not remain just a tempest in the teacup of high culture but actually became ‘popular’, this is largely thanks to Andy Warhol and his Factory. Beginning in 1963, the Factory produced not only paintings but also films (and their “superstars”), music, and transmedial “Gesamtkunstwerke” like the series of Exploding Plastic Inevitable events. Warhol’s artistic production and his first exhibitions broke through the narrow confines of high art—ironically, just after Warhol had established his footing there.
In the 1950s, Warhol—born in 1928 in Pittsburgh as the son of Czechoslovakian immigrants—was successful as an advertising and commercial graphic artist in New York. Only from 1960 onwards did he begin producing paintings for the specialized market of avant-garde art. And by 1966—after the now-iconic silkscreen series of Marilyn Monroe and other stars, as well as the Death-and-Disaster images—Warhol provocatively announced the end of his “art career” with the exhibition of the Flower paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery.
This case study focuses on Warhol’s first 15 years of artistic development, from 1950 to 1966. We will examine early drawings and examples of his commercial art, his initial hand-painted series, and then the formative silkscreen paintings that defined Pop Art. Intensive reading will be required. In addition to primary sources in which Warhol himself retrospectively discusses the phenomenon of 'Pop Art' (From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980), and America (1985)), as well as the biography by Blake Gopnik (chapters up to 1966), selected secondary literature will be included. Special emphasis will be placed on Warhol’s philosophy.
The case study is guided by the following central question: How are Warhol’s technical methods and formal decisions—and thus the characteristic ‘look’ of his work—connected to the social, psychological, and theories of subjectivity as discussed in his writings and in the scholarly literature?