The Andy Warhol prints

In the second half of the twentieth century there appeared on the scene a group of young , disenchanted artists who began openly to criticize the rhetoric and failings of the Modernist view . By embracing the mundane and the commercial and dismissing the heroic and the masterpiece , they came to be called Pop Artists . They relied on exercising the Pop sensibility ' to its extreme . Of these no artists so fully embodied Pop Art as Andy Warhol or Andrew Warhola . The son of Ruthenian immigrant parents , Warhol was born and brought up in Pennsylvania . Doyle

et al describe Warhol childhood as unhappy period : Andy Warhol appears to have had a difficult childhood on several counts . Perceived as being passive , effeminate , physically awkward and weak , and sometimes weird to the point of uncanniness (this last a quality that would distinguish his adult persona , too , he was frequently harassed by other children (Doyle et al , 80 ) To some extent this fact explains queerness of the artist 's character . After studying pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology , Pittsburgh , he was a successful commercial artist in New York before becoming a painter

Ten years after his first one-man exhibition of 1952 he was the most widely known and most controversial of the pop artists . For subjects Warhol took the most banal and familiar illustrations from magazines and reproduced them , frequently employing repetition with slight variations as in his 100 Soup Cans of 1962 . He aimed at impersonality in his work and gloried in mechanical mass-production typical of his remarks were `I want to be a machine ' and `I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike , `In the future , everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes ' Alan Pratt offers his interpretation of Warhol 's aphorisms Such aphorisms are as direct and economical as the visual images he creates . Moreover , the aphoristic one-liner is also a kind of armor Warhol wears to protect himself from the public and the press and to conserve energy for his art and his life (48

Warhol made extensive use of silk-screen printing , most of which was done by assistants after the early sixties - he called his studio `The Factory . Warhol also made a cult of being boring and superficial . `I like boring things ' he said of his six-hour film Sleep of 1964 , in which there is virtually no discernible movement (Brainard , 13

Like other Pop artists , Warhol used commercial art processes as a means of paralleling artistic and mass-reproductive methods . His use of silk screening , the technique usually associated with cheap mechanical reproduction , on a traditional canvas ground is an immediate affront to the great subjective gestures of abstract painting : screen printing is absolutely flat , consistent , and generic , and in this way it both reasserts the flatness of the plane and simultaneously destroys the notion of the artist 's hand as a significant part of the work . His A Set of Six Self-Portraits of 1967 (Fig . 1 ) is indicative of the Warhol approach to image making : flat...