Andy
Warhol

The long lasting influences of Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp is present in Warhol’s work that both strives to shock and make use of everyday objects in the realm of fine art. Warhol’s cardboard Brillo boxes from 1964 and 1968 are very closely aligned to Duchamp’s concept of the ‘readymade’. The two artists also shared an interest in cross-dressing and photography. In 2010 the Andy Warhol Museum produced an exhibition that acknowledged the relationship between the two artists titled, ‘Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol’.

Unsurprisingly then, Warhol was also inspired by the Neo Dada group, which included the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who prided themselves in working within the gap between art and life. With his tongue in cheek subjects and brightly coloured silk screens Warhol sought to differentiate himself from the sombre formalism of Abstract Expressionism which had come to dominate the American post-war art world, proclaiming that, 'the Pop artists [made] images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognise in a split second…all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.'

Many of Warhol’s works throughout his career point to the artist’s sexuality as a gay man, despite the criminalisation of homosexuality at the time in the United States. Warhol’s sexuality has remained a topic that is spoken little about in relation to his life and work, a reminder of the lasting effects of the homophobia that characterised the socio-political landscape of mid-late 20th-century America. In the 1950s Warhol produced sketchbooks of drawings of the male form, including studies of feet, torsos and genitalia, entitled, Boy Portraits. His films from the 1960s were also overlain with references to homosexual desire and sexual escapades. The artists Sex Parts and Torso series from the 1970s also engaged with the male (and female) nude form.

After losing the lease on his Silver Factory in 1967, Warhol was famously shot in 1968 in his studio by the writer Valerie Solanas, who featured in his film I, a Man (1967). The shooting was nearly fatal and had a profound effect on the rest of the artist’s life and output, marking a transition from Warhol’s all-encompassing, experimental art practice, to one more subdued.

One of Warhol’s last works was Last Supper based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance masterpiece, completed in 1986 about a year before the artist’s death.

The artwork is prophetic, touching upon key themes within Warhol’s oeuvre and personal life, such as religion, mortality, and symbolic iconography. The original artwork is the largest size ever brought to auction by the Pop Artist; it sold for $60,875,000 with Christie’s in 2017, among one of the highest prices ever achieved for Warhol’s work. This work was on display on a huge scale at Tate Modern’s Warhol retrospective in 2020.