Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American artist, a leading figure of the Pop Art movement. ​Using a variety of media materials from photographs up to computer-generated art, Warhol's works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity, culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s.
Emerging from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, Warhol became a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York. In 1960, he began to produce his first canvases depicting Popeye and Dick Tracy. After Marilyn Monroe’s death in August 1962, he started working from snapshots of the star’s already legendary face, which had been widely distributed by the world’s press. His choice of subjects clearly relates to an obsession with demise – his Marilyns, his Ten Lizies (created when the actress Elizabeth Taylor was seriously ill), and also his Elvis. Part of the “Death and Disaster” series, Andy Warhol´s Marilyn Monroes are undoubtedly iconic portraits of our era, exploring as they do the artist’s fascination for images of death and beauty. He worked across many media as a painter, printmaker, illustrator, film-maker, and writer, and produced many world-famous series. Andy Warhol Flower´s series reinterprets a traditional motif spanning the history of art, while Warhol´s Cambell´s Soup Can series represents the mass-produced, printed advertisements that inspired him since his childhood. Towards the end of 1962, the artist turned to the photo-silkscreen process, which became his signature medium. From 1963 up until 1968, the year in which he was shot, Warhol – surrounded by assistants in his studio The Factory – took the industrial character of his work to its climax. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions and books, as well as feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Andy Warhol´s artworks are some of the most influential works of art of the second half of the twentieth century, representing the most recognizable images ever produced.

Andy Warhol

Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images.

In 1962, Andy Warhol produced a number of silkscreen renditions of Elvis Presley from a single photo. The image he used to represent Elvis was taken from a publicity still for the 1960 film Flaming Star. By selecting this particular shot, Warhol avoided giving us The King – or “Elvis playing Elvis” – and instead gave us Elvis in the role of a cowboy.

Warhol’s prediction that in the future everybody would be famous for at least fifteen minutes shows his fascination with the very fleeting quality of fame. By depicting Elvis in his cowboy getup, he has even made The King seem fleeting. With his gun pointed at the viewer, Elvis appears fierce at first glance, but this does not hide the eclectic and contrasting mix of ideas that the work embodies – Elvis the superstar vs. Elvis the “sub-star,” Elvis The King vs. Elvis the cowboy, and Elvis the rocker vs. Elvis the robber.

As with all of his depictions of stars, Warhol’s use of repeated motifs here, too, sheds light on the element of exhaustion in pop culture.

Blue Elvis is a porcelain multiple, a limited edition of only 49 copies published by Rosenthal Studio-line in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual Arts INC., New York.

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“ My first experiments with (silk) screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month (August 1962), I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face. „

—Andy Warhol