Andrew Warhola was born August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, to Slovakian immigrants. He grew up in a devout Byzantine Catholic family, within an Eastern European neighborhood in the city. When he was eight, Andy developed chorea, a condition of the nervous system that kept him in bed for months. This was the time when he received his first drawing lessons from his mother, who was a skillful artist. When he was nine, his mother bought him a camera, and he took up the hobby of photography as well. When he was 14, his father passed away, but he left his life savings to go towards Andy’s college education, so that he could pursue his promise as an artist. In September 1949, Warhol (having changed his name) landed a job at Glamour magazine, launching a successful career as a commercial artist that would run through the 1950’s (“Andy Warhol”). The end of the decade saw him turn his attention more to painting and, in 1961, he introduced the notion of “pop art,” or works that centered around commercial goods that were produced en masse. His most famous subject, the Campbell’s soup cans, debuted in 1962. Later common figures would include vacuum cleaners and glass Coca-Cola bottles; celebrity subjects would include Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe (Indiana). In 1964, he opened his own studio, known as “The Factory,” which became one of the premier cultural salons in all of New York City. In the 1970’s Warhol moved into video art, making more than 60 films. He branched into television in the 1980’s. On February 22, 1987, he passed away at the age of 58 (“Andy Warhol”), having spent his entire artistic career forcing the viewer to think about the importance of the material, and about the role of celebrity.
“Dead Stop” is one of Warhol’s earlier paintings, made while he was still working at Glamour. It is done on Strathmore paper with ink and wash, and is 19.5 inches by 23 inches. It is one of Warhol’s earliest adaptations of an object that is found in popular culture – the diamond-shaped traffic sign (Foster). Rather than render it in its traditional yellow, he has chosen to keep this work monochromatic, with everything running in black, white and gray. Also, the terminology on the usual sign is “DEAD END,” not “DEAD STOP,” and so the adaptation here clearly has a metaphorical purpose that is more explicit than what would appear in the more vivid forms of pop art that he would later create. Here, the “dead stop” could be taken to refer to any number of ideas. The dark, shadowy lines that move from the sign to the cars undulate and take on a number of forms; one in particular, rising from the hood of the car on the right to the sign, looks like it could be the shadowy soul of one of the dead.
The colors in this piece are black, white and gray. The visual focus is clearly the sign itself, although the place where the cars meet, behind the sign, is the most important place in the painting. The shadowy lines rising from the cars allow for considerable interpretive freedom. The artist’s decision to use black and white gives the work a more somber look, which is more appropriate given the subject. The curvilinear shadows highlight the sense of the bizarre that so often accompanies senseless, arbitrary death.
The theme is the absurdity of random, unexpected death in modern society. In the 1950’s, there was a great deal of optimism in society; even though the specter of nuclear war hung over the world, there was also a great deal of economic growth that kept Americans focused on the things they could acquire (Davis). It was this new element in American society that Warhol seized on and made his own oeuvre – to a greater extent in the late 1950’s and 1960’s than in this painting. The use of the automobile collision takes the idea that America was a highly mobile, highly autonomous society and shows how all of that freedom can come to a halt with one crash.
This work, in summary, provides a cautionary tale for those who thought that the rapid expansion of the American economy in the years after World War II, with the increased number of consumer goods available, would mean that there was a new era of happiness on the way. This optimism ignored the rampant discrimination that was still a part of American culture, if one happened to be African-American or a woman of any race, as well as the blanket of silence that hung over the gay community in those days – a topic which would have resonated with Warhol. With all of those contradictions in place, all it would take would be a relatively minor disruption in the provision of economic goodies (on the scale of an automobile crash) to send society into an uproar. Indeed, just a decade after Warhol painted this, American society was torn apart by the civil rights struggle and the morass that the Vietnam War would become.
Works Cited
“Andy Warhol.” Biography. http://www.biography.com/people/andy-warhol-9523875?page=1.
Web.
Davis, Ryan. “Double Exposure.” A Journal of Performance and Art 34/2: 46-55. Print.
Foster, Hal. “Test Subjects.” October 132: 30-42. Print.
Indiana, Gary. Andy Warhol: And the Can that Sold the World. New York: Basic Books,
2010. Print.
Warhol, Andy. Dead Stop. Ink and wash on Strathmore paper.
http://www.warhol.org/Warhol/Content/collection/art/earlywork/1998-1-1097/. Web.
