PRESENTED BY:
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Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in the
neighborhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol's parents were
Slovakian immigrants. His father, Ondrej Warhola,
was a construction worker, while his mother, Julia
Warhola, was an embroiderer. They were devout
Byzantine Catholics who attended mass regularly,
and maintained much of their Slovakian culture and
heritage while living in one of Pittsburgh's Eastern
European ethnic enclaves.
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Warhol attended Holmes Elementary school and
took the free art classes offered at the Carnegie
Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art) in
Pittsburgh. In 1942, at the age of 14
he graduated from college with his Bachelor of
Fine Arts degree in 1949, Warhol moved to New
York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist
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In the late 1950s, Warhol began devoting more
attention to painting, and in 1961, he debuted the
concept of "pop art"—paintings that focused on
mass-produced commercial goods. In 1962, he
exhibited the now-iconic paintings of Campbell's
soup cans
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Warhol's early commercial illustration has recently
been acclaimed as the arena in which he first
learned to manipulate popular tastes. His drawings
were often comic, decorative, and whimsical, and
their tone is entirely different from the cold and
impersonal mood of his Pop art.
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Much debate still surrounds the iconic
screenprinted images with which Warhol
established his reputation as a Pop artist
in the early 1960s.
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Although artists had drawn on popular culture
throughout the 20th century, Pop art marked an
important new stage in the breakdown between high
and low art forms. Warhol's paintings from the early
1960s were important in pioneering these
developments, but it is arguable that the diverse
activities of his later years were just as influential in
expanding the implications of Pop art into other
spheres, and further eroding the borders between the
worlds of high art and popular culture.
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Although Warhol would continue to create paintings
intermittently throughout his career, in 1965 he
officially retired from the medium to concentrate on
making experimental films. Despite years of
neglect, these films have recently attracted
widespread interest, and Warhol is now seen as one
of the most important filmmakers of the period.
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Although best known for his silkscreen paintings, Andy
Warhol was also an excellent draughtsman. Drawing
was a constant part of his artistic practice. As a child he
took classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and he won
several awards for drawings he produced in high school.
At Carnegie Institute for Technology (now Carnegie
Mellon University), where Warhol earned a degree in
pictorial design, his offbeat, nontraditional and
sometimes irreverent drawing style did not always meet
his professors’ academic standards. At one point they
forced him to do extra work over the summer to remain
in good standing at school. Upon graduation, Warhol
moved to New York to begin his commercial design
career
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In the 1950s Warhol used a “blotted line” technique
to develop a signature style for his illustrations.
Blotted line combines drawing with very basic
printmaking, and it enabled Warhol to create a
variety of illustrations along a similar theme. The
process had many complex components.
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Warhol’s impact on art and society was tremendous; this
paper offers a highly restricted view of his potential for
consumer researchers. By applying some methods of art
criticism to his vast body of work, insight was gained in
key areas of consumer research: brand equity; clothing,
fashion and beauty; imagery; packaging; and selfconcept. Art history is equipped with much more
theoretically challenging theories and frameworks-this
paper gleaned insights from a surface skimming of the
treasures of art criticism and art history. Further work is
necessary to articulate how art historical techniques
might complement literary tools that have earned a place
within the consumer researcher’s toolbox.
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As we move into a postmodern society, dominated by
visual images, informed by five hundred cable
television channels, and obsessed with global symbols,
visual literacy takes on greater importance to both the
consumer and marketer. Art criticism seems a useful
area to study the central role images play in consumer
behavior-joining successful applications of other
humanities based approaches. Marketing, in particular,
encourages symbolic associations: products to images,
images to products. To fully understand consumer
behavior requires an appreciation of the long heritage of
art scholarship. This project represents a step toward
mining the rich ground of art history to extract nuggets
of wisdom about consumers and the society they live in.
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Holbrook, Morris B. and R. B. Zirlin (1985), "Artistic Creation, Artworks
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