Growing up during the Depression in a working-class immigrant family near Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol spent much of his early life on the outside looking in. The seductive world of consumer goods remained out of his reach as a child, and as an adult he found himself shut out of the fine art world because of his advertising background. Andy’s first published drawing was, appropriately enough, an image of five shoes going up a “ladder of success,” published in the summer 1949 issue of Glamour. By the 1950s, Warhol had established himself as a successful commercial illustrator—a profession that clashed with prevailing notions of what it meant to be a “real” artist. Abstract Expressionism, which was exemplified by hard-drinking macho painters like Jackson Pollock, dominated America’s postwar painting world. Its frenetic, expressive style was celebrated by American and European critics as the authentic, spontaneous eruption of the human spirit—an antidote to the deadening standardization of popular culture that Andy grew up with and admired. If Pollack’s drip paintings communicated a wild emotional intensity, Warhol’s silkscreened prints were deliberately flat and deadpan, the antithesis of the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic.

From Chapter 3 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

As was often the case throughout his career, Andy Warhol was more a popularizer than a pioneer. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jasper Johns and his boyfriend Robert Rauschenberg were already pushing back on the art world’s informal ban on real-world objects by painting familiar things like flags, targets, and maps. They made their work under the influence of their friend John Cage, who encouraged others to incorporate chance methods and mundane materials from mass culture into their work. During this time, Sally Banes noted, artists turned their attention to everyday life: “It had become a symbol of egalitarianism, and it was the standard stuff of avant-garde artworks and performances.” By 1962, the term Pop Art was being applied to work produced by the likes of Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and its poster man-child, Warhol. Pop Art’s buzzy, glowing sheen fit the cultural mood of the day, when the consumer economy exploded with color and abundance. This public interest intensified after Warhol’s first solo show at the Stable Gallery in November 1962, which featured his silkscreened Marilyn Monroe portraits, Coca-Cola bottles, and other works that became iconic. Pop Art ran counter to the serious sensibilities of Ab-Ex painters, who treated commercial culture with contempt and thought Warhol’s work was vapid and commercial (he was happy to be guilty as charged). For some of the chest-beating, chin-massaging painters whose work was quickly being supplanted by Pop Art’s new guard, Warhol’s persona was too fey to be taken seriously. (This was another criticism Warhol never bothered to counter.)

From Chapter 3 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

While happily buzzing along on Obetrol, a diet pill often abused as a stimulant, Andy Warhol began filming his boyfriend, poet John Giorno, as he slumbered at night. This resulted in the long silent film Sleep, which was composed of twenty-two different shots, some of which were looped and repeated several times. Warhol also began working on a series of Kiss films, which included little more than scenesters such as Ed Sanders locking lips in semi-slow motion. “When he made his first films, Kiss, already I had almost fifteen years of cinema in me,” Jonas Mekas recalled. “I was publishing Film Culture magazine already for ten years, and writing. So I was very familiar, and I immediately saw that this is different—this is new, this is important. I was running at that time a filmmakers’ showcase on Twenty-Seventh Street between Park Avenue and Lexington, and that’s where I presented that series of Kiss films and premiered Sleep and his early silent films.”

From Chapter 10 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore