Andy Warhol and The Factory

Andy Warhol and The Factory

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Andy Warhol and The Factory

Andy Warhol created The Factory in 1963. It was his own studio and also the place where other artists from different disciplines worked.

It was a meeting place, a place of creation and fun for artists, but also for a varied “fauna” of rich people (who in turn were the ones who bought art), extravagant, bohemian, transgressors, and celebrities. As one of the musicians of The Velvet Undergroung (a group supported and promoted by Warhol, and for whom he designed the famous album cover with a banana) says: “While one person was making a silkscreen, somebody else would be filming a screen test. Every day, something new…”

The Factory was the navel of the New York art world at that time. (In the 1950s, New York had become the art capital of the Western world.)

The name The Factory speaks of artistic production, but referring to pop art and its era (of which Warhol is the greatest reference we can find), the concept of “factory” is the opposite of the traditional production of an artist and speaks instead of mass production, the production that we relate to mass consumption. We are decidedly in the art world where heroes and heroines are now movie stars, and the protagonist of a painting is no longer a mythological god or an aristocrat but a can of soup.

Over time, The Factory changed locations (there were 3 venues in total, always in Manhattan). The first of them, the one we see in the image, was the first one, called the Silver Factory because it was covered with silver paint, tinfoil, and pieces of broken mirrors. Glitter, lots of glitter, for an avant-garde environment where people lived and created at full speed. And in the broken mirrors, the reflection of an era.

Image: Andy Warhol at the Silver Factory (1965)

Recommended links:

Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962).

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

“Inspiration is television.”

Pop Art and its Themes.

Pop Art in 5 points.

F-111, the Huge Pop Art Painting of James Rosenquist.

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