High priest of Pop Art dies

Press, 24 February 1987, Page 10

High priest of Pop Art dies

By

JOHN ABELL

NZPA-Reuter New York

Andy Warhol, trickster, celebrity and high priest of Pop Art, has died of a heart attack, aged 59.

He suffered the attack on Sunday in a New York hospital, where he had gall bladder surgery on Saturday, said a hospital spokeswoman. Warhol — who once said that in the future, everyone would be world famous for 15 minutes — was himself famous for his "Campbell Soup" paintings, montage portraits of pop celebrities, and films which ’ lacked plot and direction but never imagination. Warhol sprang from relative obscurity at the height of the pyschedelic 1960 s and endured as a symbol of avantguardism through three decades of rapid change in art tastes.

A frequent sight on New York streets, where he would stop to pose for pictures by passers-by, the laconic Warhol was also a leading player in the city’s chic nightlife, where his presence often defined an event as important. But Warhol may have teased those who idolised him so: rumour had it that he sometimes hired impersonators to make brief appearances at parties in his name.

Leo Castelli, who was an eatty dealer of Warhol workgLsaid: “If he had not

been a celebrity he could not have done what he did.” The author, Tom Wolfe, an observer of the 1960 s counter-culture that spawned Warhol’s popularity, said: “Warhol also mocked the art world itself, and they couldn’t get enough of it.”

Warhol, an unmistakeable figure with bleached, unkempt hair — a look he maintained with an identical wig — said he was motivated by two ambitions: to be outrageous and to make money.

He once said he had been told by an art instructor that he should paint things that were important to him.

He began by making stencilled pictures of money. Appropriately, A the Warhol work that fetched

the highest price in his lifetime was a depiction of $2OO bills. It sold for $U5385,000 ($713,000) at an auction last year.

Warhol’s series of paintings faithfully depicting a can of Campbell’s Soup launched the "Pop Art” movement in the early 19605, an arid period in American art that was ready for a new fad. “I’d been eating soup for lunch for 20 years, so I painted it,” he said. Warhol branched out at his vast Manhattan loft dubbed “The Factory” into producing epic-length films highlighting eroticism, humour and boredom.

Examples were “Sleep,” a six-hour study of a man sleeping, and “Empire,” eight hours of a single shot of New York’s Empire State Building.

Born Andy Warhola in Pittsburgh on August 6, 1927, he was one of three sons of Czech immigrants. Warhol never married, and lived with his mother in an apartment on New York City’s fashionable Upper East Side. William Rubin, director of the Museum of Modem Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, called Warhol’s work essential to the Post-Moder-nist movement

"Andy Warhol was a serious artist whose posture was unseriousness,” he said.