Merry Christmas and Blessed Yule

An Andy Warhol Christmas

The American artist and pop icon Andy Warhol was one of the first artists I admired as a middle-school kid in the early seventies.  But I only discovered his sweeter side when I looked at a package of Christmas cards about ten years ago. 

The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post article entitled A Look at Andy Warhol's Spiritual Side:

The man often called the Pope of Pop attended Mass several times a
week, worked in a soup kitchen, kept a crucifix and devotional book on
his bedside table and prayed daily with his mother, a devout Byzantine
Catholic who lived with him until her death in 1972.

(For a more complete post on the life and work of Andy Warhold, please see my post here)

 

ABC Wednesday and Artist of the Week - Warhol

W is for Warhol

 Andy Warhol

(August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987)

American Pop Artist

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."

~Andy Warhol

 (one of my favorite Warhol photos)


“I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say "figment."

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room row house apartment at 73 Orr Street in Pittsburgh. His parents, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants Andrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons. Andy was their youngest.
Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father, a laborer, moved his family to a brick home on Dawson Street in 1934. Warhol attended the nearby Holmes School and took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now The Carnegie Museum of Art). In addition to drawing, Hollywood movies enraptured Andy and he frequented the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. Andy enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself in his basement.  Read the rest of the biography here

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
Andy Warhol

Self-Portrait

"I am a deeply superficial person." 
~Andy Warhol

Gold Marylin

1962

"I love it when you ask actors, 'What're you doing now?' and they say 'I'm between roles.' To be living life between roles.' That's my favorite."

 ~ Andy Warhol

 Eight Elvises
1963

The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market." $100 million is a benchmark price that only Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-August Renoir, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning have achieved.^[1]

 Jackie

1964 

"I think everybody should like everybody."

Velvet Underground album cover

Originally released in March 1967 by Verve Records. Recorded in 1966 during Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, The Velvet Underground & Nico would gain notoriety for its experimentalist performance sensibilities, as well as its focus on controversial subject matter expressed in many of their songs.

1969

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest."
Andy Warhol

Flowers

1970

 Mao

1972

Andy Warhol's Mao Tse Tung (1972) is a silk-screen portrait of the Chinese leader that was made in many versions. It is one of the series of silk-screens that he made on the subject of fame. They began in the early 1960s with his many portraits of Marilyn Monroe whose sad death in 1962 led him to contemplation of what it meant to be famous and what it could possibly be worth. read the rest at Lots of Essays.com

Note:  best for last but chronologically out of order:  Warhol cats from the 1950's. I also like his little Christmas drawings which I hope to feature sometime in the coming week.

 

"It's all about your attitude."

Sources:

The Warhol Museum

 ^{Warhol biography:  scenes of cinema e-journal} 

The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

 <sup>Lots of Essay.com

The Modern Cat 

Thinkexist</sup>

^{See other participants at ABC Wednesday}

Happy Winter Solstice

 Quincy Market

Boston, Massachusetts

 All the best to you and yours during The Season of Lights

Pagan Sphinx Photo 2009 © All Rights Reserved

Pagan Sphinx Entertainment Highligh

A WIlliam Boroughs Christmas

I hope nobody's gonna their thong all in a knot (actually, I hope they do) over William Burroughs After all, it's just a story.   ;-)

Spoofing Mona