ANDY WARHOL, MUSIC AND FASHION
The relationship between Andy Warhol, music and fashion is essential to understanding the importance of his artistic production.
If in fact Warhol is the most important exponent of Pop Art, it is due to the fact that he turned the artist’s studio into a creativity factory.
Andy Warhol’s life is full of moments in which his artistic genius was combined with great entrepreneurial skill.
He was in fact a great anticipatory genius and, in the 1980s, he became a veritable pop-star. His fans would stand in long lines to get their idol to sign Campbell’s soup cans, photographs, posters, magazines, banknotes… anything, once signed by the king of Pop Art, ended up as art.
Andy Warhol was, in fact, the first truly great business artist in history.
Andy Warhol, music and fashion
La copertina dell’album dei Velvet Underground
“Business art is the step right after Art. I started as a commercial artist and I want to finish as a business artist.” – Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol’s art ended up becoming one with business.
He no longer wanted to be the artist Andy Warhol, but the artist-entrepreneur at the head of a company that produced art and creativity.
He did not lack a flair for business and proved it when artist Andy Warhol switched from advertising to Pop Art.
He started out with small amounts of money and then went on to invest more and more as the business grew. So it was that he started to produce more and more famous works and even went as far as directing his first films in the 1960s, later becoming a full-fledged producer; he later entrusted the direction of his feature films to Paul Morissey.
Sticky Fingers” dei The Rolling Stones
ANDY WARHOL AND MUSIC
Andy Warhol’s artistic and entrepreneurial experiments touched many areas and that of music was one of the most interesting.
Andy was in fact the manager and producer of the rock band The Velvet Underground, to which he introduced and added the German singer and model Nico in 1966.
After having created the famous cover with the banana for the band, Warhol created many others, among which the most famous is undoubtedly that of the album ‘Sticky Fingers’ by The Rolling Stones, still considered the most famous cover in the entire history of contemporary music.
Andy Warhol con il magazine Interview
ANDY WARHOL AND FASHION
Even before artists such as Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol proved to be a luminary in being the first to understand the possibility of transforming himself into a real star. For this reason, his public image was studied down to the smallest detail, and what mattered was essentially that his visual identity was recognisable.
Already in the 1950s, he had done illustrations for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Later, he befriended and portrayed the most famous designers including Diane von Furstenberg, Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent and Halston. For the latter, with whom he formed a sincere friendship, he also produced a major art-advertising campaign and several offset posters on paper, which today are considered a perfect example of the marriage of art and fashion.
The poster’s main function is to communicate through the power of an image, and it was for this reason that Andy Warhol easily appropriated this commercial medium, elevating it to a first-rate artistic medium.
The brilliant heir of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the inventor of the modern poster aesthetic, the American artist made an enormous contribution to this world through his use of serialisation, incessant repetition of images and his great capacity for using colour.
Equally important for Andy Warhol’s entrepreneurial career is the founding in 1969 of Interview magazine, which was the prototype of today’s celebrity and gossip magazine. Once again, the relationship between Andy Warhol and celebrities, combined with industrial production thanks to the Factory, created the conditions for the realisation of something visionary and revolutionary.
ALL BOOKS ABOUT ANDY WARHOL
Much has been written about Andy Warhol and you can find a wide selection of readings on Amazon but also on other platforms.
