COLUMN | TERRY CHECK
15 MINUTES
OF FAME
H
ave you ever visited a
modern art museum,
like the Tate in London
or MoMA in New York,
and wondered, “Is this picture of
a Campbell soup can or a stack of
supermarket boxes really fine art?”
It’s hard to imagine sometimes
why art is loved by so many art
enthusiasts willing to pay millions
of dollars for a single piece by Andy
Warhol. Take, for example, the 1984
Michael Jackson portrait: Warhol
silkscreened a photograph onto
canvas, then brushed on bold colors,
highlighting facial features that created a cartoon-like character
resembling a mask. Huge crowds throughout the world attend
his art exhibitions. What is it about Andy Warhol that fascinates
so many?
Born in the dirty steelmaking city of Pittsburg,
Pennsylvania, this son of immigrants was raised by loving
parents in a tenement where dinner was often ketchup mixed
in hot water. Contracting Sydenham’s chorea at an early age,
the shy and frail boy was mostly bedridden for a year, unable
to attend school, yet staying faithful to his church. With his
mother’s encouragement, he started to cut out pictures from
movie magazines and drew sketches of Hollywood stars in a
world far from his own. Warhol eventually recovered, finished
school, and graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology,
where he studied commercial art. The rich imagery gathered
during his childhood, the glamour of movie stars, and the
influence of the Catholic religion would eventually fuse into
his artwork portraying celebrities as cultural icons.
Desperate to join the glitzy world of movie magazines,
the young Warhol packed his bags and headed to New York City
in search of a job as a commercial illustrator. Dressed in a worn
suit and carrying his art portfolio inside a paper bag, he called
upon art directors of all the uptown fashion magazines. Often
Warhol would hang around a coffee shop called “Serendipity
III” on East 60th Street, where he drew sketches in exchange
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for pastries and coffee, and spent hours gazing
across the room to watch famous movie stars
like Marilyn Monroe and Marlena Dietrich.
After long days of interviewing
with Madison Avenue advertising agencies
and enduring rejection after rejection, the
struggling artist would sip cappuccino at
Serendipity III with the shop owner, Stephen
Bruce, and show him the rejected sketches
that nobody bought. Offering to help Warhol,
who always seemed socially awkward, Steve
hung the sketches on the coffee shop walls
with a selling price of $25 each, splitting the
sales 50/50 with the artist. Wow… this was
his first exhibition in 1950. Warhol, known as
“Raggedy Andy” and always wearing the same worn gray suit
and