![]() Although infamous for its louche and drug-fueled parties, the Factory was the site of enormous creative productivity. He christened the space the Factory, covered all its surfaces in silver, and watched it morph into a hive of countercultural activity. In 1963, with his painting practice expanding, Warhol moved his studio from a rented firehouse to a fifth-floor loft on East 47th Street that once housed a hat factory. It was a game-changing artistic breakthrough, for him and for future artists, legitimizing the commercial method for use in fine art. He quickly invented what would become his signature style–a grainy black image printed repeatedly–in series, grids, rows, or pairs–on painted canvas often strikingly colored. In his hunt to capture the look and feel of commercialized postwar America, Warhol began experimenting with the tools of mechanical reproduction, namely, the photo-silkscreening technique. He described the canvases as “portraits”-a genre he’d continue to explore in depth for the next 35 years. He created 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans for the 1962 show, each a different variety, hand-painted to mimic the uniformity of mass production. When dealer Irving Blum of the cutting-edge Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles spotted the paintings during a studio visit, he offered Warhol a solo exhibition on the spot. ![]() ![]() But his Campbell Soup Cans were a different story. Neither his homoerotic drawings nor his comic-book inspired images caught on, and Warhol faced a number of rejections from dealers. Although a regular visitor to the city’s progressive galleries, where Pop Art was beginning to percolate, Warhol was also somewhat of an art world outsider-“too swish,” as he later described, for the more discreetly gay social circle of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He also began collecting work by his contemporaries, including Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, and Frank Stella, whose vanguard ranks he aspired to join. That simple form of printing foreshadowed the radical experiments with silkscreening that he’d use to forever transform the look and feel of painting.īy the late 1950s, Warhol had earned enough as an illustrator to purchase a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and to fill it with American antiques and folk art. As curator Donna De Salvo has pointed out, the duplicate looked simultaneously handmade and mass-produced – an appealing duality long at the core of Warhol’s aesthetic. Warhol’s fashionable sought-after style looked different than other illustrations, characterized by his jagged “blotted line,” which he achieved by pressing paper to a wet ink drawing to create a blotchier duplicate.
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