276 - SECRET LIVES OF GREAT ARTISTSANDY WARHOL - 277Andy Warhol wanted to be famouswentieth-century famous. He wanted the kind of fame in which millions know your name and the paparazzi follow your every move. He wanted Picasso to be a nonen-MMM, MMM, GOODThe next day at his local grocery store, Warhol bought one of each of the thirty-two varieties of Campbell soup. He always loved Campbell anyway, particularly tomato, since his mother used to serve it to him for lunch. He made color slides of each can, projected them on a screen, and drew the outlines. He painted each variety of soup against a white canvas. With the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1963, Warhol took the technique a step further and created a series of portraits of the star. Rather than paint them, he used a silkscreen process, a sophisticated stenciling technique often used for T-shirts that allowed him to make a series of identical images. Warhol produced twenty-three different Marilyn paintings, from Gold Marilyn, a single image silk-screened onto a gold background, to the Marilyn Diptych, two hundred repetitions of the same portrait across twelve feet of canvas. The portraits were both an homage to and a critique of fame: So much repetition turned the woman into a commodity, the ultimate price of fame. The reaction of the New York art scene was electric. Suddenly Abstract Expressionism was hopelessly pass. (Willem de Kooning, a friend and rival of Pollock, stopped Warhol at a party and shouted, oue a killer of art, youe a killer of beauty, and youe even a killer of laughter!� Pop Art was everywhere, and no Pop artist was more famous than Warhol. He started showing up at parties accompanied by a retinue of lovely women and gay men. To keep his name in the papers, he hired publicists who slipped tidbits to gossip columnists. Meanwhile, he refined his look. He was losing his hair, so he wore wigs, first blond like his own hair and then silvery gray. He added heavy-framed glasses that emphasized his owlish look and donned black jeans, black turtlenecks or T-shirts, and black leather jackets.tity by comparison. No one understood celebrity like Warhol. No one else studied it so assiduously or cultivated it so carefully. And no one else was as capable of manufacturing fame. As the ultimate creator, consumer, and critic of fame, Warhol packaged and polished the name brand ndy Warhol�until every household in America recognized the silver-wigged artist. He had a great run, with his fifteen minutes stretching well into a half hour, at least.STAR SEARCHAndrew Warhol was the third son of Julia and Andrei Warhola, immigrants to Pittsburgh from present-day Slovakia. Julia babied Andy, who suffered ill health in his childhood and took up drawing during months of convalescence. Young Andy was fascinated with movie stars, particularly Shirley Temple, saving up his pennies to join her fan club. In college at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Warhol majored in art, and his fascination with fame grew. He became obsessed with Truman Capote, who lived in New York, made vast sums of money, and attended parties with movie stars. Warhol decided that if Capote could do it, so could he, and he took off for New York immediately after graduation. Warhol could have started painting and pursuing gallery owners, but instead he threw himself into commercial illustrationhat where the money was. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day turning out charming illustrations and before long he was in huge demand, but commercial success only made it harder for Warhol to be taken seriously by the fine-art world. Even more difficult was finding his own style, for the Abstract Expressionists continued to dominate the scene. He tried everything he could think of to develop a style that would get him noticed. He painted a series of shoes (Warhol had a bit of a fetish), but it was too similar to his advertising work. He experimented with oversized cartoons, but Roy Lichtenstein got there first. He depicted Coke bottles but still felt compelled to add Abstractionist drips and splotches. Then one night a friend suggested, ou should paint something that everybody sees every day, that everyone recognizes . . . like a can of soup.�FACTORY LIFEBy 1963 Warhol silkscreen equipment took up his whole apartment, so he rented a warehouse and dubbed it he Factory.�People started showing up at all hours, people with names like Rotten Rita, the Mayor, the Duchess, and the Sugar Plum Fairyisfits, allany gay or transsexual, and most addicted to amphetamines. Before long, the Factory became a round-the-clock party. Warhol got hooked on pills but somehow kept working, expanding his efforts into underground filmmaking and the management of the band the Velvet Under-
