Jacques Bellini, 1978-80

To this end, as well as to initiate a serial production of his works ( seriality is one of the hallmarks of Andy Warhol’s art), the American artist used industrial production techniques such as screen printing on canvas (an artistic printing technique that uses a textile, steel or nylon support as a matrix). Warhol is also known for creating the Factory, a place where up-and-coming artists and superstars of the period converged, which also became famous for its avant-garde parties (in fact, it was said that a party without Andy Warhol was not really a party). Behind this “star,” however, lay a far more shy and elusive personality. On one side was the man and the artist wearing a mask to keep a proper distance from the world, and on the other side was the man and his weaknesses. The main feature of Andy Warhol’s works, which made him famous, was the seriality with which he depicted objects and people that became the icons of the American way of life. The artist posed toward the world as a machine that coldly and impersonally records the reality around him, so the best way to express this artistically was to use the silkscreen technique, the only one that allowed him the effects of objectivity, since the “artist’s touch” was not necessary. He used mechanical systems (the machine cannot lie) to recapture the mechanicalness and seriality of all 20th-century living. Andy Warhol is an exemplary case for understanding what happened in the 1960s, and to do so, as the artist himself stated, one need only look at the surface of his works. In reality, it was not a true portrait, but rather a reproduction of his public image, the one disseminated by the mass media to please admirers. What interested Warhol was the way communication was transformed, and the artist himself never took an ethical stance: in fact, what he thought about in private is not known (indeed, Warhol was one of the most ambiguous artists in art history). He painted, as he had to say in an interview, “what you see every day” but also what the person or thing, becomes the object of collective adoration.