"Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again"

Paintings

The famous Marilyn Monroe.


When he decided to pursue a career as an artist, Warhol already had established a reputation as a commercial illustrator mostly doing illustrations of shoes. In school he had created paintings, but his work afterward had mainly consisted of "blotted ink" illustrations for warehouses and magazines. He felt he was not being taken seriously as an illustrator and wanted to become a true artist.

When he started painting, he wanted to find a target for himself. At the time Pop Art, as it was later named, was already an experimental form. Warhol turned to this new style where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with added paint drips. He added these drips to give his paintings a seriousness by emulating the style of the abstract expressionists that were popular at the time. He wanted to be taken seriously or to sell his paintings, which may have had the same meaning to Warhol.

To him, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons were already being used by the artist Roy Lichtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns, and so on; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. In his signature way of taking things literally, for his first major exhibition he painted his famous cans of Campbell's Soup, which he had for lunch most of his life. Warhol loved money, so he later painted money. He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well.

From these beginnings he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the hand-made from the artistic process. Warhol frequently employed silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. In other words, Warhol went from being a painter to being a designer of paintings. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, in different versions and variations following his directions.

Warhol produced both 'comic' (e.g., soup cans) and 'serious' (e.g., electric chairs) works. Warhol used the same techniques - silkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colors- whether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes, and disasters (as part of a 1962-1963 series called "Death and Disaster"). The "Death and Disaster" paintings (e.g. "Red Car Crash", "Purple Jumping Man", "Orange Disaster") transform personal tragedies into public spectacles, and signal the prominence of images of disaster in the media, indicating how we become numbed to such images through mass reproduction.

The unifying element in Warhol's work is his deadpan Keatonesque style - artistically and personally affectless. This was mirrored by Warhol's own demeanor, as he often played "dumb" to the media, and refused to explain his work. Before this blankness, the lack of signifiers of sincerity, the viewer is forced to attempt to read behind the surface to what the 'real Andy' thinks. Is Andy horrifed by death or does he think it is funny? Are soup cans in art galleries about the cheapness of mass culture, a cynical joke about the American collector's artistic nationalism (and aim for their wallet), or his genuine love for his mother (who maternally fed him canned soup)? His refusal to speak to how these works ought to be read made these works all the more interesting - he left the interpretation of these works entirely up to his audience.

One might say that Warhol's work as a Pop Artist was always somewhat conceptual. His series of do-it-yourself paintings and Rorschach blots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be.
Warhol took so many things as his subject (from soup cans to celebrities to electric chairs) that some might think he simply appropriated popular images, and gave them a "Warhol look". Sometimes, however, there was a personal connection between the artist and his subjects. For instance, his paintings of cans of Campbell's Soup not only function as deadpan comments on commercial industry and advertisement, they also pay homage to an intrinsic part of Warhol's life and memories. As a child his mother had given him this soup when he was sick, and Warhol loved it very much as an adult. For him (and for many other Americans) the soup represented a feeling of being "home". Like the "piss paintings", the soup cans also function as a joke about Abstract Expressionism, which some people described as "soupy" paintings, because of the way that artists like Pollock spilled and splashed paint on their canvases. Other works similary function as statements about art. Warhol painted dollar signs and dollar bills, for example, as allegorical comments on the relationship between art and money. Art appears here as a commodity: the paintings of dollar signs or dollar bills represent the "secret" of art - that it is all about money. These works thus do more than merely depict dollar bills. They touch on our ideas about artistic value, and the relationship between art and the market.