Andy Warhol knew the value of a dollar. It’s a lesson no child growing up during the Great Depression ever forgets. But for Warhol, the son of working-class immigrant parents, the American dream must have seemed particularly out of reach.
For Andrej and Julia Warhola, however, their youngest son was the dream. The Warholas knew Andy’s talent was undeniable. Determined to save enough money to ensure his future, Andy’s father worked long hours on construction sites and in coal mines. Andrej died in 1942, hoping his son would be able to continue studying art at a nearby university.
Andy not only earned a fine arts degree in pictorial design from Carnegie Institute of Technology, but also earned the distinction of being the first in his family to go to college.
It was during Warhol’s tenure at Carnegie Tech (now known as Carnegie Mellon University) that one professor prophetically observed that he was “the only student that had a product to sell.”
Those “products” are the subject of The Andy Warhol Museum’s latest exhibition. Running through September 1, Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints offers a closer look at the artist’s works on paper.
Shortly after graduating in 1949, a young Andrew Warhola took his wares and moved to New York City in search of fame and fortune. Andy Warhol would eventually find both, but he began his professional career as an illustrator for fashion magazines and retailers. His unique blotted-line style, a technique that combined drawing with basic printmaking, distinguished him from the competition. He was in high demand, but he knew he didn’t want to work exclusively as a Madison Avenue adman.
“Art historians have tried to describe a moment in Warhol’s career, around 1963, where he moves from something called commercial art to something called fine art,” says Alex Taylor, an associate professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s history of art and architecture department.
“I think that’s a false path, a false dichotomy,” he continues. “These two things always coexisted. Almost all successful artists have an eye to business, but they often try to hide it.”
Warhol, however, was surprisingly candid about his ambitions. He never completely abandoned his commercial and commissioned undertakings even as he gained prominence as a Pop art pioneer.
“He was always clear and transparent that he was there to make money,” says Amber Morgan, The Andy Warhol Museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, who curated this exhibition. “He was a very savvy businessman who was running many different types of businesses at the same time. There was Interview magazine and his film company. He was a painter, photographer, film director, entrepreneur, and commercial artist.”
In fact, by the mid-1970s, Warhol famously quipped, “Business art is the step that comes after art. … Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”
Uneasy bedfellows
Art and money have a long and complicated relationship. There are those who say artists should stay true to their craft—no matter what the cost. But even some of history’s most renowned artists accepted the financial realities of their profession.
Without the financial backing of the Medici family, Leonardo da Vinci may have been forced to take on a side gig—something akin to a 15th-century DoorDash driver—to support his work, and the world may never have experienced some of his most profound works.
“Sometimes it’s thought of as a little gauche to talk about money,” Morgan says. “Artists shouldn’t sell out.” That was especially true during the counterculture movement of the ’60s and ’70s, a time when the younger generation actively and vocally rejected the values and norms of their parents.
“One of the reasons why the modernist avant-garde became so paranoid about the appearance of profit was the sense that it disqualified their products from being serious artistic achievements,” says Taylor, the author of Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s. “What is so distinctive about Warhol is that he’s making profit the point, leaning into it. In some ways, it was the very subject of his art.”
It is this intersection—the place where creativity and capitalism collide—that Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints sets out to explore. The show offers visitors a wealth of Warhol’s works on paper; and yet the nearly 100 works on display are just a fraction of the roughly 20,000 prints Warhol created throughout his practice.
“What is so distinctive about Warhol is that he’s making profit the point, leaning into it. In some ways, it was the very subject of his art.”
-Alex Taylor, associate professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s History of Art and Architecture department
According to Morgan, there’s a misconception that prints and posters (what you might hang up in a dorm room) are the same. They are not. “When we talk about Warhol’s prints, we’re talking about original works of art that are very collectible,” she says.
Nowadays, these works are relatively rare and prohibitively expensive for the average art aficionado, but once upon a time, they were rolling off the presses. Their availability made them affordable for fans and invaluable to Warhol, who recognized them as a reliable source of discretionary income.
Warhol embraced the mechanical and economically viable nature of screenprinting early in his career and quickly put his own stamp on the process, creating multiples of a single image and using bold, almost psychedelic layers of color.
Marilyn, Space Fruit, and Dollar Signs
The show features many of his greatest hits, including portraits of (Chairman) Mao, Mona (Lisa), and Marilyn (Monroe), not to mention Campbell’s soup cans; his first known screenprints of $1 and $2 bills produced from his hand-drawn acetates; and Space Fruit: Lemons, a series of partially completed prints (each a framed piece highlighting the addition of a specific color).
One aspect of Warhol’s personal and professional life that tends to get little attention is also an integral part of the show. “We don’t always talk about his generous side,” Morgan says. “But Warhol would use his name and celebrity to support things that were important to him.” In other words, he would create prints that could be sold to help raise awareness for causes (endangered species) or politicians (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter) he believed in.
One example in Good Business, notable as much for its “diamond dust” sparkle as its philanthropic origins, is the never-before-displayed portrait of Mildred Scheel, founder of the German Cancer Society.
“We don’t always talk about his generous side. But Warhol would use his name and celebrity to support things that were important to him.”
-Amber Morgan, The Andy Warhol Museum’s director of collections and exhibitions
Keeping the business theme top of mind, an entire section is devoted to Warhol’s dollar signs. “We have a bunch of them,” Morgan notes, “so we’re able to see Warhol playing with the same image. There are different colors, different sizes, multiple dollar signs, and single dollar signs.”
This cluster of prints allows viewers to engage in what The Warhol’s director of learning, Heather White, likes to call “deep looking.”
“Screenprints look—and feel—different than works on canvas,” she says. “In a lot of Warhol’s canvases, you can see the paint strokes and the texture of the paint. By contrast, the flatness of the prints is really apparent, and the colors feel a lot more matte.”
“This show has a large education component, and we’re tasked with showing the process. It’s exciting to be able to geek out about printmaking.”
-Heather White, The Warhol’s director of learning
Other factors come into the picture as well. There’s the choice of paper: record-cover stock, museum board, bond or high white? There’s the overlay of colors: Should the orange go over the purple or the purple over the orange? What about the registration? The viscosity? The squeegee?
It’s a lot for visitors to take in, but help in the form of a short how-to video and illustrated brochure on the screenprinting process will be on-site. And those looking to give the process a try can check out the museum’s underground studio space where visitors can create their own works of art.
“This show has a large education component, and we’re tasked with showing the process,” White says. “It’s exciting to be able to geek out about printmaking.”
The Art of Making Art
Warhol did not invent screenprinting.
It had been around for centuries before he arrived on the scene. Still used to this day by the textile industry to transfer patterns onto clothing and wallpaper, it was also a handy editing tool for graphic designers before computers changed everything.
Warhol wasn’t even the first painter (the ’30s and ’40s saw many artists experimenting with what they called “serigraphs”) nor was he the only painter of his era to employ screenprinting (think Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg).
But in Warhol’s hands, it became a means to many ends.
“The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” Warhol said in a 1963 interview with ARTnews, “and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”
That same year, Warhol opened his inaugural Silver Factory in Midtown Manhattan, signaling an assembly-line approach to making art. The it-takes-a-village philosophy was nothing new for Warhol. Early in his career, he would host coloring parties at Serendipity 3 (he loved their signature Frrrozen Hot Chocolate), where friends and strangers alike would help him add color to his drawings.
“Warhol was always working in collaboration with other people,” White says. “Artists trust others with their vision all the time. I imagine most of Warhol’s paper prints were done by studios specializing in printmaking. To think he was in the studio as prints were being pulled probably didn’t happen.”
That doesn’t mean they weren’t made to his specifications, inconsistencies and all. Warhol called it “chancy”—the random variations that might occur from layer to layer, print to print.
“It would be the same image with slight differences,” Morgan explains. “Maybe the ink built up from using the screen over and over again, or maybe the registration was off. Warhol was excited about this random effect. He said it was ‘quick and chancy.’”
The relatively fast turnaround time from concept to finished product was another draw for Warhol. He figured out the math: More screenprints equaled more sales, and more sales added up to more funding for his other less lucrative projects.
“Who’s going to pay money to sit and watch Empire [his 1964 avant-garde art film] for eight hours?” Morgan asks. “He realized he could do both. He could support himself financially by making things people desired and then use that money to finance the things that were more experimental.”
And people wanted what he was selling—the movie-star portraits, the cows, the daisies, the banana. Maybe Warhol and the Pop art movement he advanced were actually—ironically—calling out society’s obsession with consumerism and celebrity.
“I like money on the wall,” Warhol once declared. “Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”
Although the quote is a bit cynical for even Warhol, Taylor suggests that it fails to speak to the intrinsic beauty of art and our attraction to beautiful things. “I think Warhol was interested in money and business and what that meant for the status of art objects,” Taylor says. “But he was interested in all sorts of other things, too. And those things mingled and coexisted, making his work rich and complex and nuanced.”
“I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”
-Andy Warhol
His print portfolios and editions were, at least during his lifetime, also accessible and affordable, bringing art to the people in a somewhat egalitarian way.
“I don’t think he would have thought about it quite so philosophically as to call it democratic,” Morgan says. “But his family didn’t have a lot of money, didn’t always have things. Coming from that background, I think it made him feel good to see more people participating in art.”
Warhol would no doubt approve of his namesake museum’s plans to take Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints on the road.
According to Morgan, the show was developed in part to respond to requests from smaller regional museums and university galleries around the country looking for a traveling exhibition to rent. For these facilities, space (not too big) and money (not too expensive) are the primary concerns.
The Warhol answered the call.
“We’re excited to show it here first because of its specific focus and the education component,” Morgan says. “It also gives us the opportunity to work out all the details, prepare the text, share our ideas, and be better able to help guide venues through the show.”
The bottom line, she adds, is pretty straightforward: “We’re hoping to get these works in front of different audiences.”
In Warhol’s words: “Exposure and attention make a work famous—the more you talk about it, the more attention it gets, the more validity it achieves.”
Lead support for Good Business: Andy Warhol’s Screenprints is provided by Nathalie and Stan Doobin. Generous support is provided by Clifford and Diane Rowe, Brian Wongchaowart and Andi Irwin, Debbie and William S. Demchak, Ina and Lawrence N. Gumberg, and Christine J. Toretti. Additional support is provided by Michele Fabrizi.
Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
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