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_Andy Warhol _
By: Jason Petrone
It is rare for an artist to become a celebrity, but Andy Warhol experienced
much more than his “fifteen minutes of fame”, and became an icon of his
generation. Warhol was involved in many artistic fields such as painting,
filmmaking and photography, but nevertheless was a businessman, social
connoisseur and self-promoter. He was a major contributor to the Pop art
movement, a period when mainstream objects, such as comic strips,
advertisements and celebrity photos, were incorporated into many works.
Warhol’s Campbell Soup series and later his celebrity series are some of the
most well known works of pop art, that are still referenced in print and
advertising today. However, not all of his works dealt with intriguing
celebrities or mainstream advertising. Few people are familiar with Warhol’s
darker side, evident in his “Disaster” paintings, a period in which such
tragedy as, car accidents, suicide and capital punishment captured Warhol’s
interest. These morbid works differ from his Pop Art masterpieces, and are
crucial in understanding Warhol’s overall body of work. Warhol graduated from
the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, with a degree in pictorial
design. He then went to New York City to work as a commercial illustrator, and
later began painting towards the late 1950’s. His work did not gain notoriety
until around 1962 when his Campbell soup prints and Marilyn Monroe painting
gained respect in the art world. However this period was a tumultuous time in
Warhol’s life. He was not yet a celebrity, and had his coming out as a
homosexual, while at the same time the effects of the Vietnam conflict were
felt across the country. These conflicting emotions can be seen many Warhol’s
paintings, but later served as a catalyst for his “Disaster” paintings. In the
early 1960s capital punishment became a powerful political issue. Warhol aimed
to capture the feeling of an execution in his “Death and Disaster”
masterpiece, “Electric Chair”. In it we see the image of an actual electric
chair at Sing Sing state prison in New York. The chair had been the world’s
most famous, with a total of 614 inmates being put to death. In 1963 the chair
was abandoned for a more humane means of execution, the lethal injection.
Produced just the next year, the painting shows an image of the unoccupied
chair with the word “silence” eerily placed in the top right hand corner.
Warhol’s color scheme involves using dark shadows to give the execution
chamber a gloomy dungeon atmosphere. In addition to the shadows, the work
itself is blurry and somewhat unclear, which adds to the melancholy feel of
the execution chamber. It is obvious he is trying to paint an extremely
negative portrait of the death penalty, a kind of artistic protest. He
condemns condemn capital punishment by making the prisoners seem like the
victims. One can imagine this painting as the viewpoint of a condemned
prisoner, walking into this morose room and viewing the instrument of his
death. However, challengers to Warhol’s belief can argue that while the
electric chair we see in this work is barbaric, we don’t know what crimes were
committed to lead to a room like this. Someone facing this electric chair
could have committed a gruesome crime and deserved such a fate. Warhol only
gives us a viewpoint of the scared inmate, if we were to know what led to this
person being executed, we would be less sympathetic. Warhol’s use of the
infamous Sing Sing chair did not stop with this one painting. In 1967 he
produced “Big Electric Chair”, which differed from its predecessor in many
ways. In this version, he focused in on the chair itself, making the chair
stand out, as if it were on stage. This time we see much less background,
giving the impression that someone might this time be in the room. Perhaps
this is a new viewpoint Warhol gives his “inmate”, a closer vantagepoint for
his condemned prisoner. The color used in this work seems to take away from
the gloomy, ominous tone of the first, however a sense of morbidity remains.
Though the presentation is different, the theme of the original “Electric
Chair” remains. Warhol is trying to strengthen his argument by using different
viewpoints. The colors of this work strengthen his argument because such hues
should have no part in such a gloomy place. The full use of color gives the
work a more painterly appearance than the first, and creates striking
juxtaposition between the vivid color and dark subject matter. This was
Warhol’s intention, he wanted to present fun, acrylic colors illuminating a
desolate tool of death. The colors prove a shocking means of giving the
painting a lighthearted feel, in the hopes that the viewer will reassess their
own beliefs on capital punishment. The Electric Chair series continued in 1971
with Warhol reprinting several of the Sing Sing chairs, using repetition,
various positions, and different colors. Each one of these prints evokes
different senses and has a different mood, while staying true to the original
theme. This series of prints is an epic conclusion to Warhol’s original
electric chair. The works differ from the original in a variety of ways,
however the theme and ideas behind the series remains true to the original.
Due to the number of different works he produced on this topic, we can
conclude capital punishment captivated Warhol’s artistic mind, and his
opposition proved a key-motivating factor in producing these masterpieces.
This electric chair series shows a side of Warhol not seen in his most popular
works. Through these paintings, he is able to successfully voice his opinion
on capital punishment, and by giving vision to an otherwise aural debate, he
presents an extremely convincing argument. Few people ever see what an
execution chamber actually looks like, and with Warhol making this setting as
dark as possible, he makes a very powerful and lasting statement.
Word Count: 981
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