The Great American Life and Death of Andy Warhol

Death...Warholian style



Just as Warhol seemed to recognise the odd equality that existed within the lives of every American regardless of social class or cultural background, this equality was perhaps investigated again, as unconsciously as he continued to claim, in his artwork that dealt with the subject of Death. This is, after life itself, the ultimate universal constant for humanity. This ubiquity of death was most forcibly depicted in his series collectively known as his "Death and Disaster" series.
This series travelled down several avenues:



The
DEATH OF GLAMOUR

: A series comprising of celebrity portraits, whose lives directly or indirectly had been touched by death; including portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor.
The
PLEBIAN CATASTROPHES

: A series featuring some of the most gruesome imagery of everyday disasters attained from media archives and directly translated on to canvas by Warhol. Within this series, Warhol also included paintings that dealt with the instruments of death including the gun, the atom bomb and perhaps most famously the electric chair.
  • As in his paintings of consumer products, Warhol retained his creative distance by employing the same means of production and activating many of the same aesthetic devices in the production of these paintings.

    But in the face of some of these images, already inherently charged with an emotive power, the value of coloration, repetition and the casual "mistakes" caused by his mechanical techniques instantly have new symbollic meaning for the viewer and it was inevitable that the critic would search fervently for a Warholian consciousness.

    The innitial choice and subsequent arrangement of images on to the canvas was analysed scrupulously by the critic, applying his baggage of theoretical meanings to any sign of a conscious manipulation of the resulting effect.


    • Created by Joanne Patterson
    Last Updated: 9 June 1997
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