Paintings and prints
In the early 1960s, the Pop art movement was an experimental form that several artists were independently adopting. Warhol, who would be dubbed the "Pope of Pop Art" and "King of Pop," turned to this new style, where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. He experimented with his artistic style and painting techniques before he became synonymous with the movement. His early paintings feature images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of Abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning. His first Pop art paintings were displayed in April 1961, serving as the backdrop for the New York Department Store Bonwit Teller's window display.
In 1962, Warhol adopted the silkscreen print process as a technique for making paintings to make a more "assembly-line effect." For this process, a photograph was enlarged and transferred in glue onto a silk mesh. Ink was then rolled across the screen with a squeegee, passing through the unsealed areas of the mesh, thereby transferring the image onto the canvas. Warhol had several assistants throughout his career, including Gerard Malanga, Ronnie Cutrone, Jay Shriver, and Benjamin Liu who helped him produced his silkscreen, following his directions to make different variations.
For his first major exhibition in 1962, Warhol painted his celebrated cans of Campbell's soup, which he claimed to have had for lunch for 20 years. Warhol began to make paintings of everyday objects such as Coca-Cola bottles, dollar bills, trading stamps, and more gruesome subjects such as images of suicide, electric chairs, and car crashes, as in the Death and Disaster (1962–67) series. He also painted portraits of icons such as Warren Beatty, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy. His work became popular and controversial. Warhol articulated an egalitarian view of consumer goods, noting that products such as Coca-Cola were shared across social classes: "You can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too."
Throughout the 1960s, Warhol repeatedly returned to Marilyn Monroe as a subject, creating works such as Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), serial images including Marilyn Diptych (1962), the Flavor Marilyns (1962)—named for their color and Life Savers candy flavors. In 1964, four of his new larger Marilyn canvases were famously shot by performance artist Dorothy Podber, resulting in the Shot Marilyns.
In 1967, Warhol established Factory Additions as his printmaking and publishing enterprise, issuing portfolios of ten images in editions of 250. In 1970, some of the acetate films used to produce some of Warhol's screenprints were taken to Europe, where they were used to create a new series of editions published under the name "Sunday B. Morning." Produced in Belgium using the same color references as the original Factory prints, the editions included versions of Warhol's Marilyn Monroe, Flowers, Campbell's Soup I, Campbell's Soup II, and Dollar Bill images. Although Warhol initially signed and numbered one edition of 250, he later distanced himself from the project after disputes with collaborators, and some prints were stamped "Fill in Your Own Signature" or inscribed by Warhol with the phrase "This is not by me, Andy Warhol." Early versions bore black stamps on the verso, shifting to blue ink later on.
In the 1970s, Warhol evolved into a portraiture artist, painting commissioned portraits of celebrities and socialites. The last portrait he made at the old Factory at 33 Union Square West, in 1974, was of his mother, Julia Warhola, who had died two years earlier. In the new Factory at 860 Broadway, he left behind the finger-painting and gestural complexity of his 1972–74 works for a cleaner, more streamlined style—echoing the shift from the old studio's clutter to the new one's openness. Many of the portraits Warhol produced between 1975 and 1976, share a soft, pastel look, with distant eyes under washes of azure, mint, or lavender. This style defined his portrayals of Mick Jagger, Joe MacDonald, Roy Lichtenstein, Marilyn Karp, Marcia Weisman, and Tina Freeman.
Warhol wasn't only painting commissioned portraits—though some non-portrait works were still dealer-commissioned before he began them. His studio production returned to mid-sixties levels, with the same intensity and volume. After the Mao series (1972–73), he created Hand Colored Flowers (1974), a portfolio of 10 flower prints, silkscreened in black and hand watercolored. In 1975, Warhol completed the Ladies and Gentlemen series, followed by Cats and Dogs in 1976 and the Skulls series later that year. He subsequently began working on Hammer and Sickle (1976–77). In 1977, he debuted his Torsos and Athletes series, and then began Oxidation (1977–78) also known as "piss paintings," which were abstract works that Warhol created by exposing a layer of metallic paint to urine, and Shadows (1978–79).
In 1979, Warhol was commissioned to paint a BMW M1 Group 4 racing version for the fourth installment of the BMW Art Car project. He was initially asked to paint a BMW 320i in 1978, but the car model was changed, and it didn't qualify for the race that year. Warhol was the first artist to paint directly onto the automobile himself instead of letting technicians transfer a scale-model design to the car. Reportedly, it took him only 23 minutes to paint the entire car. Racecar drivers Hervé Poulain, Manfred Winkelhock and Marcel Mignot drove the car at the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans.
In 1979, Warhol began his Reversals and Retrospectives series, revisiting earlier subjects such as Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, and his disaster imagery. During the 1980s, art dealer Ronald Feldman often handled the legal and licensing issues surrounding Warhol's print and painting projects, working closely with Warhol and his business manager Fred Hughes. Feldman commissioned several portfolios, including Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980), Myths (1981), and Endangered Species (1983).
In 1983, Warhol began collaborating with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. Warhol and Basquiat created a series of more than 50 large collaborative works between 1984 and 1985. In their collaborations, Warhol would silkscreen or paint words, symbols, newspaper headlines, or enlarged corporate logos—such as Paramount Pictures or General Electric—onto the canvas, which Basquiat would then rework with his own expressionistic figures, text, and imagery, adding to and subtracting from Warhol's compositions.
Late in his career, camouflage became a recurring motif in Warhol's work. The paradox of using a pattern designed to conceal its subject appears to have appealed to him as he incorporated it into several series in 1986, including Statues of Liberty, Self-Portraits, and Last Supper, based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. At the time of his death, Warhol was working on several print portfolios, including Beethoven (1987), for a series on composers, and Moonwalk (1987), from a proposed history of television series.
