Notes on Andy Warhol and his technique

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

Warhol had many assistants including Gerard Malanga, Brigid Berlin and Ronald Tavel. His assistants' approach was very significant, and his workshop ethos was both generated as a result of and influenced by his technique. His assistants allude to the techniques in which his works were produced, and his thought process. Marco Livingston states that Warhol ‘presented himself merely as a mediator’, putting a lot of onus on his assistants. Warhol says, ‘I was never embarrassed about asking someone, literally, ‘What should I paint?’ because Pop comes from the outside, and how is asking someone for ideas any different from looking for them in a magazine?’ 

Warhol barely planned his compositions according to Malanga, who said that ‘His vagueness was pretty precise’. Perhaps, he wanted to create a likeness in all of his work, to imitate his opinion that 'everyone should be a machine'. He painted white makeup onto his models, including Elizabeth Taylor, to anonymise her features and make her appear more cartoon-like, and he wanted more people to take up screen-printing so that his work couldn't be identified as his own. Livingston also says that 'Warhol devised numerous ways — both obvious and devious — of creating surfaces that looked as though they had barely been touched by his hand. Not only because it was part of his style to remain enigmatic but because he saw it as one of his roles to give the critics a job to do.' He replaced his mother's trademark signature on his work with 'a signature worthy of the Invisible Man: a simple rubber stamp of the type used by, or on behalf of, officials too busy or remote from their work to be able to sign their own names to it.' For all of these reasons, we get the impression that Warhol wanted anonymity and banality in his works from the Pop Art era, and that that was what came to epitomise Andy Warhol's paintings.​

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