Andy Warhol As The Face of Pop Art

When someone says the words “pop art”, people’s most immediate thought is Andy Warhol. The genius behind the Campbell’s soup cans and portrait prints of Marilyn Monroe is thought to be the face of Pop Art, but out of all of the artists, why him? There are the three reasons why Warhol became the face of Pop Art over the other pop artists.

The first is that he started his career in the commercial world. Rather than try to make it as an artist right off the bat, he worked is way up doing advertisements and getting his name out there. Because of the commercial nature of Pop Art, his time doing advertisements greatly influenced his work, leading him more into the art world.

Andy’s work was repetitive and took mundane objects like soup cans and blew life into them. The familiarity with the subjects of his work drew him an audience and he continued making repetitive art- some paintings, some screen prints. Of course everyone was familiar with Campbell’s soup cans, but Warhol became even more famous when he began doing portraits of celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. In addition to the paintings and screen prints, Andy Warhol was one of the first artists to experiment with film as an art form. His versatility in mediums brought him a lot of attention, but the real reason that he is the king of pop art is because his work is beautiful.

Warhol has a simple and colorful aesthetic. His work is clean and relatable. The subjects of his art are very familiar to the audience and his work is accessible outside of the gallery. Andy Warhol’s work screams Pop Art because he perfectly portrays popular culture with his art, whether through paintings, prints, or films. Warhol was deeply involved in the Pop Art movement not just making art, but interacting and working with other artists and creating his own environment, The Factory, for art to be created and displayed. Though Warhol was an outcast in the rest of the world as an artistic gay sufferer of Sydenham's chorea, he was welcomed by the art world and became the godfather of Pop Art.