ANDY WARHOL

In his later career the American artist Andy Warhol (1928–87) was famous simply for being famous, so much had his own celebrity overtaken awareness of the art he actually produced. This paradoxical state of affairs receives a fascinating analysis in this film surveying Warhol’s art. It begins with Warhol’s early success in commercial art and reaction against the prevailing tenets of Abstract Expressionism, tracing his emergence as a leading figure of the American Pop Art movement of the early 1960s. It shows how his repeat images of mundane commodities such as Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, and the early mega-stars Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, acquired icon status as expressions of the American Dream in its new phase of mass-media culture and machine production. Warhol’s activities as an ‘underground’ film-maker are also covered here in depth, with commentary from the cast members of such films as Sleep and the notoriously sexually explicit Chelsea Girls providing a unique insight beneath the mask-like surface of Warhol’s images.