Ric Burns has written, directed and produced award-winning historical documentaries for nearly 20 years. His latest project is a two-part film on pop artist Andy Warhol, a Pittsburgh native who found beauty in everything from soup cans to movie stars. Below, Burns answers some questions about his film.

Q: Eugene O’Neill, the Donner Party, Coney Island, Ansel Adams, New York, and now Andy Warhol for AMERICAN MASTERS. What is it about these seemingly disparate subjects that attracts you as a filmmaker?

A: I think what most filmmakers are looking for in a subject is something which is transfiguring. If you look at the history of New York or the story of Andy Warhol or the story of the Westward migration or the story of Coney Island, the central thing that ties it all together is each one of these events, personalities, institutions, or cities transfigured the reality of American culture completely and continues to do so. The contribution of someone like Warhol in terms of how he changed and continues to change our culture is inestimable.

Q: What interested you in the story of Andy Warhol?

A: The amazing thing about Warhol is that he was so successful at projecting an image of who he was that he actually mesmerized posterity. People have taken him at his word. “If you’re looking for Andy Warhol,” he once famously said, “don’t look any further than the surface of my paintings or the surface of me. There’s nothing behind there.” There’s nothing recherché about the story of Andy Warhol. It’s there in print, in biographies, in letters, in paintings, and movies and friends and memories. If you walk behind the image that he created for himself, you discover one of the greatest stories in the history of art, in the history of American culture, a Horatio Alger story like nothing you’ve ever seen. There is not a person in America who cannot relate with their heart as well as their head to the rags-to-riches story of Andy Warhol, this kid with everything going against him in Pittsburgh – immigrant parents, in the Depression, growing up in two rooms with two older brothers, sleeping in the same bed with them, no indoor toilet, no radio, no hot or cold running water. Not a regular guy, clear to everybody but his mother from the start, small, frail, very bright, very vulnerable, incredibly shy, a host of childhood ailments culminating in St. Vitus dance when he was eight, which basically kind of put the kibosh on his schooling for a while.

He really had every challenge he possibly could have: a gay, dyslexic, poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who grasped American culture as it came out of the ground in the 20th century more viscerally, more intuitively and more brilliantly than anybody before us and who came to New York, implausibly, in 1949, with $200 in his pocket, and 10 years later bought a townhouse on Lexington Avenue. He transformed himself into the most highly paid and most successful and well thought of commercial artist in America. At which point the story hadn’t begun yet, at which point he still wasn’t Andy Warhol, the Andy Warhol.

Q: Put your film in the context of the culture of that time.

A: We will probably never fully tally what happened in the 1960s. It was a transformative few years which really began in November ‘63 when JFK was shot and ended in ‘68 or ‘69. In the film, we start in Pittsburgh in 1928 and end with Andy’s death. But it’s a film about the 1960s because Andy was about the 1960s. Andy lived the life of his culture. He was the opposite of the cloistered artist who goes into his studio and shuts the door. He couldn’t have made art under those circumstances. He was about opening the door. He was absolutely the supreme multimedia artist of the 1960s. Not a hippie. Who knows what his politics were?

Q: Are there any misconceptions about Andy Warhol that your film addresses?

A: That he wasn’t an artist, that it was all a fraud, that it was all about marketing. You can go out and find people today who think that he was a sham and a travesty and that it was all smoke and mirrors. And they think that they have all the arguments marshaled. He didn’t make his stuff. It was all reproduced. Those are people who are not willing to confront his artistic output. It’s so wonderful to work on a project like this because you’re surrounded by great art basically every minute of the day.

Q: Where did a poor kid from Pittsburgh get his imaginative spark?

A: The great cultural critic, Wayne Koestenbaum, who’s interviewed in the film, said, “Imagine that an artist, Andy Warhol, learned his art not from Picasso and Matisse and Rembrandt but from Lana Turner, Shirley Temple and his mother, Julia Warhola.” By the time he was eight, he was obsessed with Shirley Temple, and he understood the narratives of poor little rich girl, which became the title of one of his own films with Edie Sedgwick in 1965. At a time when it was thought that everything commercial, everything representational was by definition debased and non-artistic he said, no, the commercial is just as artistic as the non-commercial. The fallen world of soup cans and Brillo boxes and iconic Hollywood images tells us as much about who we are than action drip paintings, than color field paintings, all by artists whom he admired: Pollock, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg. He was tremendously erudite in contemporary art and in the history of art.

Q: Was Andy Warhol a great artist?

A: He was absolutely the greatest artist not only of his generation but of the second half of the 20th century. He may have been the greatest artist of the 20th century. Already it’s the case that if you asked anybody on the street who knows perhaps nothing about art, to think of two painters and name the painting, one painting of each of them, I guarantee you, I could tell you what the answer is already. Leonardo, The Mona Lisa. Andy Warhol, and I’ll name one of two or possibly both paintings: Soupcans and Marilyn. The very greatest artists leave the holy precincts of fine art in terms of their impact. They escape the specific gravity just of the art world, and Warhol was obsessed with doing that. He wanted to make art that was immediately legible and powerful to not just the priestly sect of people who buy, sell, collect and argue professionally about art, but to anybody who could come up and go “Wham! That means something to me.” It was crucial to him.

Q: What did he think about fame and celebrity?

A: He wanted to be successful. He wanted to be rich. He had to be famous. If he was not himself famous, he would have, somebody once said, killed himself. He understood that fame and celebrity were the most important reality in a mass media culture. The glue that holds us all together is a glue whose table of contents is Babe Ruth, Jackie Kennedy, O.J. Simpson. We know who we are, and we know we belong to the same group because of this extraordinarily complicated sort of currency called fame and celebrity, distributed through the mass media. It tells us who we are. It tells us what we want to become. It’s where we find our commonality, and he was going to be the poet laureate of that media culture and the supreme archaeologist of the society devoted to celebrity and obsessed by fame. And the fact that he himself was obsessed by it in no way, it seems to me, either contradicts or invalidates his desire to be the supreme archaeologist for it.

Q: Why do you think he seized the imagination of the general populace?

A: He was like a Jacksonian Democrat. He understood that what art is about is what human beings are about. Art is about transformation. Art is about the desire to be or imagine yourself as something other than who you are. And that it’s something which all human beings participate in. All children play those games. That’s why Shirley Temple was more important to him than Jackson Pollock. It’s all about who you would like to be. Art is about the most basic human desire, which may be as powerful as the need for food and sex – to transubstantiate yourself into something else. And that the iconic images, which became the subjects of his paintings, whether they’re soup cans or Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley or electric chairs, are the images that galvanize us at the most basic level. It was like he had a geiger counter in his imagination that went, “This is hot. This is what someone cares about. This is what they hope for or fear at the deepest level. I will make that the subject of my next painting.”

Q: How has the value of his artwork changed over the years?

A: As time goes on, literally year by year, not only do the prices of his paintings go up, his value on the stock market of critical opinion simply gets higher and higher and higher and higher. The paintings that once scandalized people, people no longer can even understand how to ask the question, “Is that art?” anymore. The Marilyns, the Triple Elvises, the Soupcans, which sold scarcely one in 1962 in their original exhibit in the Ferris Gallery in Los Angeles, they’re probably worth $100 million now, those 32 paintings. He’s created works of art which have penetrated to a very elite realm. They’re invaluable. And why are they invaluable? Nobody we know is going to go out and buy it. It’s at MoMA now, those 32 “Soupcan” paintings.

Q: What about his screen tests?

A: They were three-minute screen tests. But they were not screen tests for anything because there was no movie that was going to be made. They were the movie. There’s Salvador Dali, Bob Dylan, Dennis Hopper. The list goes on and on and on. Baby Jane Holzer. Edie Sedgwick. Gerard Malanga. Everybody in the Factory, every crazy person who walked in the door. They’re overcranked, which means they’re shot at one speed and projected at another speed, which means they’re all slightly slowed down. Slowing them down, so that you’re watching someone blink, so that you can see the blink take place, are ways to make you see the object world, the real world, in a way that you wouldn’t see. And what you’re doing is you’re watching somebody. There’s no cross-cutting. There’s no different camera angle. All the frame flashes and the light leaks, the accidental jerks of the camera are included in there. Why? Because he’s not interested in the fiction that you and an actor and a filmmaker are typically making up in the course of making a movie. He’s interested in two real things: The real thing that’s before the camera and the real thing that’s watching the movie.

Q: He produced an incredible amount of work in his lifetime. Tell us about that.

A: His great mentor and rival in this respect was Picasso. He was always obsessed with, “How many paintings a year did Picasso do? How am I going to do it?” And he was like a great businessman. “How do we do it? Volume.” He was intent on producing at a prolific rate that’s really frightening and astonishing and not just in painting but across so many different media. Wayne Koestenbaum said in our film, which is so moving to me, “Why do we look at art? We look at art because we want to redeem the garbage in our lives.” And that’s what Koestenbaum sees when he looks at Andy Warhol: the maximum redemption of lost meaning. In an almost spiritual way, Andy was going to redeem it all for us.

Q: Was Warhol religious?

A: His entire life he went to church. There are many Catholics who feel that such a man certainly did not go to Heaven when he died, and there are many ways in which he comported his life which were outside the radius of the catechisms. But he was absolutely religious. Believed very powerfully in God. Try looking at his films, which are going to become much more widely seen. I’m talking about the movies made between 1963 and 1968, which are astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. Kiss, Sleep, Couch, some of them, in some literal sense, pornographic. But even the ones which are pornographic in that they show straightforward sexual coupling, gay or straight, what you very quickly realize is they’re as unpornographic as they could possibly be. The same unvarying intensity of gaze is watching the world in Sleep, a six-hour film about a man sleeping, as is going into any of the ones that are more obviously erotic and it’s the same impulse to look at the world and to see its beauty. And at some level it’s about art and maybe in a funny way it makes it powerfully Christian art. In any case, Andy wanted every moment to last. He wanted to see the beauty because he knew that if things were beautiful, then they last. Things that have beauty have a kind of fame to them.

Q: How did the city of Pittsburgh influence his art?

A: He once said, “We all live a kind of a double life. We all have our real America – Pittsburgh, Texas, Wyoming – and then we have a fantasy America, which is our dream of what everybody else is doing and all the places that we’re not.” And in a way what his art is about is those things that flash between the places we really are and the places we’re dreaming of being, and so I think his art is always about Pittsburgh. It’s always about that kid who sat looking out a window, because there was no radio, for hours at a time. He’s the kid who walked three miles each way with his mom to a church to sit for hours on end watching the absolutely flat screen of the altar. No works of art more resemble Andy Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn or Liz or Jackie than the iconic images in a Byzantine Catholic church, totally representational and absolutely not naturalistic at the same time. When it came to 1962, the day news came out that Marilyn had killed herself, when he decided that day to do a painting of Marilyn, in a sense he was reanimating the Pittsburgh experience that told him that movie stars were our religious icons. I think he meant it in a very literal way. “These are the images that have impact. These are the things that speak to us deeply.” Go look at a Marilyn painting and try to tell me it’s not one of the most moving paintings you’ve seen.

Q: What role did commercialism play?

A: Andy’s the amateur. He’s the guy who’s the commercial artist who’s absolutely condemned and derided for being just a commercial artist, who comes in and takes the world by storm. Why? What did he learn as a window dresser at Bonwit Teller? He learned that as you walk down the street, and your head swivels over towards the window at Bonwit Teller, wham, something grabbed you or didn’t. He had a total respect for those things that grab. What is most artistic is also what’s most commercial. It’s that thing that leaps out and grabs. It’s the hook. It’s the ploy. It’s the McGuffin that makes you turn your head and keep looking for a heartbeat and then pretty soon you’re standing there watching and looking and you’re caught and you buy. He understood that art and commerce and democracy were three sides of a holy triangle and that they were all about out transformation of reality.

Q: What did you learn about him from his brother, John Warhola, who is interviewed in the film?

A: That he was vulnerable like a snail without a shell and like people who are vulnerable like that, he had to create a barrier around him. He had to create a prosthetic psychic armor. That’s why you see him with his leather on and his sunglasses sitting in his chair because he really feels it’s all coming in, hurtling in, and he has no protection. So he created a sort of psychic device, which is an armor to take the place of the kind of inner armor most of us have, that we carry around with us, that allows us to feel buffered from the world. Andy didn’t have that. You know, the image of Andy Warhol, seven, eight years old, lying in bed for months on end trying to recuperate from this neurological siege, taking in fanzines, movie magazines, compulsively drawing pictures, both taking in and generating images, as if there was just a kind of free flow in both directions for Andy, no barriers, a free flow of images and feelings. It made him a very complicated person.

Q: Tell us about the attempt on his life.

A: People often were seduced by him, wanted things from him, thought he’d proffered things, held out things which weren’t going to be there. Here was a person who could seem infinitely open – a stranger could walk in the door and in five minutes find themselves in rapt conversation of the kind where time would seem to be abolished. The promise he seemed to hold out to a lot of people was that everybody would be famous for 15 minutes, and when that turned out not to be true for somebody named Valerie Solanas, the psychic impact was so great, she had to kill him. It was like kill or be killed. When he turned his back on her, as he had to, he’s not his brother’s or his sister’s keeper, when that turned out to be the case, that lack of boundaries was literally almost fatal to him. And, hence, this tremendous coherence to his story. It was not an accident that he was shy. It was a non-accident waiting to happen. When you let everything in, sooner or later, everything is going to come in. There were symbolic boundaries and real boundaries that were put up in the wake of the shooting in ‘68.

Q: How did things change at the Factory after the shooting?

A: The Factory was like the most porous social creative environment ever created, 24 hours a day, people in and out, anybody, socialites, contessas, drag queens, drug addicts, Walter Cronkite, Judy Garland, you name it. During a five-year period from January ‘64 until May ‘68, it was the Grand Central Station of our culture. The shooting took place in May, the week before Bobby Kennedy was killed. And the doors were locked at the Factory. Now it was, “Who are you? Why are you here?” You had to show your identity papers, in some sense metaphorically. And that meant that the cast of characters in the Factory changed. In large part the transvestites were driven out. It was quite bad for the drug addicts and it became a straighter place, and he became more business-like, and he didn’t want to die. One of the most moving things I’ve ever read, he said, “I’m afraid of God. And having died … I’m afraid of God. And I’m afraid of death. And having died once, I should be. But I am. I’m afraid of God.” He heard the doctors say, “He’s gone,” on the gurney at St. Vincent’s. He was revived, and he really understood that he was living on borrowed time. Every organ except for his heart and lungs was perforated by the shot. It is a miracle he lived through it. His life changed, and the life of the culture changed. And he knew it.

Q: If he’d lived, what would Andy Warhol be doing today?

A: For the man who said in the early 1960s, “In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes,” for the man who is the master of all media – way before Howard Stern – he would have understood what the Internet was all about. He anticipated what multimedia was all about. He really was a prophet. He understood where culture is going. He could draw out the lines of ramification and sometimes, in a funny way, he was so far ahead of himself and the world that by the time his own interest was up, the world hadn’t even begun to catch up with him. Looking back from the standpoint of 500 years, he will loom so, so large.

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room shack-like apartment at 73 Orr Street in the working class neighborhood of Soho in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Andrej Warhola and Julia Zavacky Warhola. The youngest of three sons, Andrew attended Holmes Elementary School and Schenley High School, and entered Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh in 1945, where he studied with Balcomb Greene, Robert Lepper, Samuel Rosenberg, and others. He experimented with his name, signing holiday cards “André,” and dropping the final “a” from his family name. He graduated in June 1949 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design.

Soon after graduating, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. His first work appeared in Glamour magazine in September 1949. Throughout the 1950s, he became one of the most successful illustrators of his time, and won numerous awards for his work from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. His clients included Tiffany & Co., The New York Times, I. Miller Shoes, Bonwit Teller, Columbia Records, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Fleming-Joffe, NBC, and others. Much of his commercial work was based on photographs and other source images, a process he would use for the rest of his life. He also employed the delightfully quirky handwriting of his mother Julia in many of his works in this period. She won a professional award for her lettering on the LP The Story of Moondog in 1958, and Warhol published a book of her drawings, Holy Cats, in 1957. She was always credited as “Andy Warhol’s Mother.” She left Pittsburgh in 1952 to join her son, and they lived together until about 1971. Warhol painted memorial portraits of her after her death; he also had made a film and shot videotapes of her.

In 1956 Warhol traveled around the world for several weeks, visiting many countries in Asia and Europe. In the late 1950s he began to devote more energy to painting. He made his first Pop paintings, based on comics and ads, in 1961, and then a series of Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962. These created a sensation in the art world and launched Warhol as a celebrity. Except for a brief period in the mid-1960s, he would continue to paint until the end of his life. He also extended his talents into other fields such as film, publishing, writing, television, and music. By the time of his death, he was one of the most prolific and well-known artists the world had ever seen.

Warhol had a life-long fascination with Hollywood. In 1962 he began a large series of celebrity portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. He also began his series of “death and disaster” paintings at this time – images of electric chairs, suicides, and car crashes.

In 1963 he began to make films, and created many classics of avant-garde cinema over a five-year period, including Sleep (1963), Empire (1963), Kiss (1963-64), and The Chelsea Girls (1966). Warhol made about 600 films from 1963 until 1976, ranging from almost 500 short Screen Tests (4-minute portrait films, from 1963-1966), to **** (a/k/a Four Stars, 1967-68), a twenty-five-hour long film. Between 1968 and 1976, Paul Morrissey directed most of his films, while Warhol was the producer.

Warhol’s first exhibition of sculptures was held in 1964, with hundreds of replicas of large supermarket product boxes, including Brillo Boxes, Heinz Boxes, Del Monte Boxes, Mott’s Boxes, and Kellogg’s Boxes. By this time, his new studio, painted silver and known as the Factory, was becoming the place to be in New York; parties held there were mentioned in gossip columns throughout the country. By the mid-1960s he was a frequent presence in magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and Esquire.

In 1965, Warhol was the first artist to exhibit video as art. He loved its immediacy, and eventually filled about 2500 videotapes, including Factory Diaries, Phoney, and others.

At an exhibition of his Flowers paintings in Paris in 1965, Warhol publicly announced that he was retiring from painting to pursue filmmaking, although he continued to make editions of fine art prints, and also sculptures. However, he began painting again in 1966. He broadened his activities into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured the rock and roll band The Velvet Underground. The EPI has been credited by some with the invention of the psychedelic light show as nightclub entertainment. The Velvet Underground went on to become one of the most influential rock bands in history. During this time, Warhol briefly operated a dance club in Manhattan called the Gymnasium, which featured exercise equipment on the dance floor.

In 1966 Warhol exhibited Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds at the Leo Castelli Gallery. The Cows were Day-Glo colored, and the Clouds were floating silvery balloons shaped like pillows. Warhol covered the exterior of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet with Cow Wallpaper in 1968.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967), came into the studio and shot Warhol in the chest, apparently because of a play she had written. He recovered from the near-fatal shooting after a five-hour operation. While recuperating he painted a large series of portraits of Happy Rockefeller, the wife of the Governor of New York.

Warhol self-published a large series of artist’s books in the 1950s, but his first mass-produced book, Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), was published in 1967. He later published a, a novel (1968), Blue Movie (1970), THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), POPism (1980), Exposures (1979), Children’s Book (1983), and America (1985). Party Book (1988), and The Diaries of Andy Warhol (1989) were published posthumously, with the latter becoming a scandalous best-seller. Beginning with a, the technique for most of his writings was transcribed recorded conversations. This method was also used for Warhol’s stage play, Pork, produced in London and New York in 1971. In total, he recorded about 3400 audiotapes.

Warhol closed the 1960s with an unusual exhibition, Raid the Icebox I, which he was invited to choose from the collection of the Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. Rather than the usual masterpieces, Warhol chose damaged paintings in the process of being repaired, the entire collection of historical footwear and parasols, and other unexpected items. At the time, he was developing a very keen eye for antiques; among his discoveries were French Art Deco designs, Native American blankets and pottery, and American Folk Art and cookie jars. Also in that year he co-founded Interview, a magazine devoted to film, fashion, and popular culture that continues to this day. Warhol’s quote, “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” is known throughout the world, and originated in about 1967 or 1968. Interview testified to Warhol’s lifelong obsession with film stars and other contemporary celebrities.

In 1971 Warhol co-designed the cover for The Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers, featuring a close-up photo of the torso of a man wearing blue jeans with a real working zipper. The design was nominated for a Grammy Award. He designed many music LP covers before, beginning in 1949, but in the 1970s he received many more commissions for these designs, which usually consisted of a painted portrait of the recording artist. His commissioned portrait paintings began in 1963, with portraits of the collector Ethel Scull, entertainer Bobby Short, and others.

Throughout the 1970s, Warhol frequently socialized with celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Truman Capote, both of whom had been important early subjects in his art. He started to receive dozens-and soon hundreds-of commissions for painted portraits from wealthy socialites, music and film stars, and other clients. He was a regular partygoer at Studio 54, the famous New York disco, along with celebrities such as fashion designer Halston, entertainer Liza Minnelli, and Bianca Jagger.

The 1970s was also a period of experimentation for Warhol. He made 3 versions of a sculpture called Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall) for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970. These consist of a large shower of water in front of a wall of 3-D lenticular prints of daisies. In the mid-1970s he experimented with an idea for an Invisible Sculpture, made of motion detectors and loud sirens. In 1978, he produced a large series of works called Oxidation paintings, made with human urine on canvases covered with metallic paint. The chemical interaction produced beautiful abstract shapes, in contrast to their shocking medium. Warhol also worked on several ideas for television shows at this time, as well as art works in video, including Water and Fight.

In 1974, Warhol started a series of Time Capsules, cardboard boxes that he filled with the materials of his everyday life, including mail, photos, art, clothing, collectibles, etc. The Time Capsules eventually numbered over 600, and are now an archival goldmine of his life and times. From the 1970s onward, Warhol continued to produce a prolific number of paintings, prints, photographs, and drawings: Mao, Ladies and Gentlemen, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Shadows, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Dollar Signs, Zeitgeist, Camouflage, and many more, culminating in his series of Last Supper paintings, which were shown in Milan in early 1987. He returned to the idea of wallpaper as art, creating Mao (1974), Self-Portrait (1978), and Fish (1984) wallpapers. Fish was part of an environmental work, Paintings for Children, in which his small paintings of Toys were hung at a child’s eyelevel on the wallpaper. His Sewn Photos (multiple prints of identical photos sewn together in a grid) were exhibited in New York in January 1987.

In the mid-1980s his television shows, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes and Andy Warhol’s TV, aired nationally on MTV and on Madison Square Garden cable television in New York. He created work for Saturday Night Live, and appeared in an episode of The Love Boat. He produced music videos for rock bands such as The Cars, and signed with the modeling agencies Ford and Zoli. He modeled in fashion shows, and in numerous print and television ads for Sony, TDK, Vidal Sassoon, and many other companies.

In 1984, Warhol collaborated with young artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring on artworks. Warhol returned to painting with a brush in these, briefly abandoning the silkscreen method he had used exclusively since 1962. Nearly all of Warhol’s works in every medium were created with the help of friends (beginning with writer Ralph Ward, and the crowd at Serendipity 3 café in the 1950s), paid assistants (beginning with Vito Giallo and Nathan Gluck in the 1950s), and managers such as Fred Hughes. Of all of these, the best known are the Superstars – the “underground” actors of his films of the 1960s such as Taylor Mead, Baby Jane Holzer, Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Polk, Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Viva, Joe Dallesandro, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and many others.

Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987, due to complications following surgery to remove his gall bladder. In 1988, a ten-day auction of his enormous estate of art and antiques raised over 20 million dollars for The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Andy Warhol Museum was announced in 1989, and opened in Pittsburgh in 1994.

–Matt Wrbican, Archivist, The Andy Warhol Museum

• What Art Is and What Is Not Art
• Andy Warhol Viewing Guide
• Art Movement Research
• Group Reports on Art Movements

Modem: 56.6 Kbps or faster
Browser: Netscape Navigator 4.0 or above or Internet Explorer 4.0 or above
Personal computer (Pentium II 350 MHz or Celeron 600 MHz) running Windows 95 or higher and at least 32 MB of RAM and/or Macintosh computer running System 8.1 or higher and at least 32 MB of RAM

Bookmark Sites:

Prior to teaching this lesson, bookmark all of the Web sites used in the lesson on each computer in your classroom, or upload all links to an online bookmarking utility such as www.portaportal.com. Preview all of the Web sites, listed below, and video clips used in the lesson to make certain that they are appropriate for your students.

An encyclopedia of art
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/

World Wide Arts Resources
http://wwar.com/artists/

Art History Resources on the Web
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html

The ARTchive
http://www.artchive.com/

Materials:
Teachers will need the following supplies:
TV/VCR/DVD
chalkboard or whiteboard
ANDY WARHOL: A DOCUMENTARY FILM
pen and pencil
computer with Internet access

Introductory Activity:

Goal: Andy Warhol was responsible for a complete reevaluation of what subject matter and artistic techniques can constitute art. In this introductory activity, students will be given a handout with a wide selection of criteria to help them develop their own schema of what types of works should be considered to be art. They will then use this initial definition to select an artwork that fits their selected criteria.

1. Show the opening segment of Part I of ANDY WARHOL: A DOCUMENTARY FILM from the opening comment that Warhol was the most American of artists until you see the title, about five minutes and 18 seconds into the program. Prior to showing the clip, ask the students to look for three references about the impact Andy Warhol had on American art in the 20th century.

2. When the segment is finished, ask the students for their responses using the following questions:

• It was mentioned that Andy Warhol was the most American of artists. What does this mean?
• How can an artist convey what it would be to be alive at a certain time in history?
• One of the speakers mentioned that people viewed the supermarket differently before Andy Warhol and after Andy Warhol. What does this mean?

3. Hand out copies of “What Art Is and What Is Not Art” from the Organizers for Students section. During class time, allow the students time to respond to all the items.

4. When they have finished filling out their responses, ask the following:

• What statements came closest to what you believe art is?
• Which statements have no correlation with your conception of what art is?
• Would most people agree with your responses? How do you explain these similarities/differences?

5. Several recommended Web sites on art history have been included in the bookmarked list on the handout. For homework, have the students go to these sites and select and print, if possible, a piece of art that most closely fits their definition of “real art” from the criteria they identified in the previous steps. The students have been asked to record the title, artist, year, and the era of art their piece represents. Go over the guidelines for their search provided in the handout.

6. When the students bring in their examples of art, ask them to show their selection and give an explanation of why they believe this piece is art. Ask them to specifically identify the criteria they selected earlier. You may collect each student handout to use for assessment purposes.

Learning Activity

Goal: Joseph Fitzpatrick, the man who taught the Saturday morning art classes young Andy Warhol attended at the Carnegie Museum during high school, has been quoted as saying, “Art is not just a subject. It’s a way of life. It’s the only subject you use from the time you open your eyes in the morning until you close them at night. Everything you look at has art or the lack of art.” Andy’s instructors at the School of Painting and Design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) refused to acknowledge any distinction between commercial art and fine art and encouraged this view in their students by exposing them to all styles of art in order to help them develop a well-rounded approach to their draftsmanship. These experiences provided Andy Warhol with a rich background in a variety of movements in art. In this activity, groups of students will explore a selection of art movements that may have informed the artist Andy Warhol would eventually become.

1. The following is a collection of clips from ANDY WARHOL: A DOCUMENTARY FILM that show the wide variety of images that Andy Warhol would have seen throughout his childhood, during his academic career, and during his early days in 1950s New York City.

NOTE: Because of the number of clips, a handout has been provided to guide students as they watch each segment. Distribute copies of the “Andy Warhol Viewing Guide” from the Organizers for Students section.

2. Prior to showing the clips, go over the “Andy Warhol Viewing Guide” with the students to make sure they know the artists and images they will be looking for while they watch the clips. All clips are from Part 1 of the AMERICAN MASTERS presentation of ANDY WARHOL: A DOCUMENTARY FILM.

• Clip 1: 8:25 to 14:55: the relationship of art and commerce to Warhol’s genius for immediacy
• Clip 2: 18:58 to 20:20: Byzantine Catholic imagery and Marilyn Monroe
• Clip 3: 23:33 to 26:16: influences of fan magazines, his mother, and Carnegie Museum classes on Warhol’s art
• Clip 4: 33:56 to 41:10: abstract expressionism and Warhol’s reconciliation of fine art with commercial art
• Clip 5: 52:00 to 53:30: contrast of abstract expressionist ethos to Warhol
• Clip 6: 56:20 to 1:16:50: pop art: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein; Warhol’s early pop art pieces
• Clip 7: 1:18:04 to 1:19:47: linking Warhol’s work with the “ready-mades” of Marcel Duchamp

3. When the class has finished watching each clip, check for understanding by asking the following questions:

• What images did Andy Warhol see as a child that may have influenced his later directions in art?
• What artists were mentioned in these clips?
• What was abstract expressionism? How was it different from the style of art Andy Warhol developed?
• What is the difference between fine art and commercial art?
• Describe art made from found objects. What artists would you associate with this style of art?

4. Divide the class into small groups and assign one of the art movements below to each group:

• the Renaissance
• romanticism
• impressionism/Postimpressionism
• dada
• surrealism
• expressionism
• cubism
• abstract expressionism
• minimalism
• pop art

5. Explain to the students that these are some of the art movements Andy Warhol would have studied — or in the cases of abstract expressionism, minimalism, and pop art, would have been actively in use when Andy Warhol was a student. Explain further that even though Andy Warhol’s art represented a distinct break from or redefinition of these movements in art, their research will be centered on what each movement thought about the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art.

6. Hand out copies of “Art Movement Research” and “Group Reports on Research” from the Organizers for Students section. Make sure the students understand what information they will be looking for as they conduct their research by going over the questions and reviewing that each group will be responsible for giving the class information on the following:

• the name of their assigned art movement
• what their movement found objectionable in art that came before
• what was the role of the artist (e.g., technician, inspired genius, interpreter of reality, historian)
• what artists represented this movement (this information has been provided on the “Group Reports on Research” handout)
• selected representative pieces of their art

7. The students will again find a representative artwork, but this time of the period of art history that they are researching. They should use the same Web sites that they used to find their artwork in the Introductory Activity. Preview the “Art Movement Research” handout where it suggests that they use the first two Web sites for background information and the second two to expand and elaborate on that information. Advise them that they may use the name of their assigned art movement in their favorite search engine if they feel they need more information.

NOTE: If it is not possible for the students to print out representative artworks to show during their presentations, below are some suggested ways to assist them to see as much art as possible during these activities:

• have the students download their selected works onto a classroom computer and use a projector to display them on a screen
• find and display slides of their selected works
• have the students write detailed descriptions of the pieces they selected
• pose members of their group in a tableau of the piece

8. As each group makes its presentation, have the rest of the class fill in their “Group Reports on Research” handouts.

9. When all the groups have finished, give each group a few minutes to formulate a statement about how their assigned art movement would respond to the following question:

• What is art?

10. Once these definitions have been presented, give the audience an opportunity to question and refine each group’s response.

Culminating Activity:

Goal: The students should now have an understanding of how Andy Warhol’s art created a whole new definition of what art is. In this activity, students will juxtapose their selected work of art from the Introductory Activity with a selection of art by Andy Warhol. They will also write a brief statement to compare and contrast the two works.

1. Explain to the students that now that they have created their own ideas on what art is and have researched various art movements’ concepts of art, they will look intensely at Warhol’s work. Show the following clips from ANDY WARHOL: A DOCUMENTARY FILM. Advise the students that these clips will provide them with an overview of the variety of subjects and styles Andy Warhol explored during his career.

Part I

• 1:24:19 to 1:36:20: Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor
• 1:37:30 to 1:38:30: the death series
• 1:40:45 to 1:44:13: Ethel Scull portraits
• 1:44:13 to 1:49:22: film/Elvis/JFK/Jackie Kennedy

Part II

• 26:25 to 29:14: Brillo boxes
• 1:02:50 to 1:07:31: “happenings”
• 1:39:00 to1:46:20: Chairman Mao
• 1:48:07 to end: the Last Supper

2. After showing these clips, have the students discuss Andy Warhol’s art using the following questions:

• Which of these pieces did you like?
• Which of them didn’t you like?
• How is the art different from that of the art movements you studied earlier?
• What elements of earlier art movements did Andy Warhol use in any of the pieces you saw?
• Was Andy Warhol laughing at people who take art seriously?
• How does Andy Warhol’s art change the definition of what art is?

3. Instruct the students to use the same Web sites from the list on the “What Art Is and What Is Not Art” handout to select a work by Andy Warhol that they responded to either positively or negatively and print it out. Assign them to write an essay comparing and contrasting these two pieces using the following prompt: Which of these works is truly art?

NOTE: The students may use the handout from the Introductory Activity for terms and ideas to help them formulate their responses.

4. Have the students attach their two works of art side by side on a larger piece of paper. Their essay explaining which piece is truly art should be glued underneath the art. Display these around the classroom, giving the students the opportunity to look at one another’s work as they would at an art show.

5. When the students have finished looking at one another’s selections, have a concluding discussion by asking the following:

• What criteria did most of you use to compare your two pieces of art?
• How many students found it easy to make connections from their original pieces to their Andy Warhol selection?
• How many students found no connection between their original pieces and the art of Andy Warhol?
• Did any students determine that Andy Warhol’s art is not art?
• After your research on different periods in art history, what do you think art is?
• Has your opinion as to what constitutes art changed?
• What is art?

Extension Activity:

• Have the students execute their own version of a Warhol work using modern-day iconography. This can be done easily by having them bring in a copy of a photo of a musician, current news event, sports hero, actor, etc. and color them in using markers or watercolors. These works could then be displayed as an art show.
• Bring in a random collection of objects. Divide the class into groups and give each group four or five objects. The group must select one item as an object of art and be prepared to present it to the class as such.