Original subtitles

Modern art.

It sells for a fortune in exclusive galleries,

but what's it ever done for us?

Has it influenced the clothes we wear? Or the buildings we live in,

the cars we drive,

the books we read to our children...? Even the way we think?

I'm Alastair Sooke, and I earn a living writing about art.

And in this series, I'm going to explore

the life and work of four titans of the 20th century -

Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.

They all changed their world, but they have they changed ours?

This week - Andy Warhol.

These are some of the most famous, valuable and controversial works of art ever made.

For many, they epitomise all that they detest about modern art.

This one is a lurid, distorted picture of a film star.

There are more than 20 versions -

just one of them sold recently for $28 million.

And the artist didn't even paint it by himself.

That artist, Andy Warhol, is as famous and controversial as the images he created.

Warhol predicted that in the future,

everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, and then spent his life making it come true,

exploiting the media to transform himself,

and his eccentric, beautiful entourage, into celebrities.

Some even say he heralded

the consumer-led, celebrity-driven world we live in today.

His influence really does seem to be everywhere, from reality TV,

to Facebook, to magazines, even to the way music is performed.

And his images are incredibly familiar - after all, Andy Warhol's the man

who painted Campbell's tomato soup and also canonised

the movie star Marilyn Monroe.

But just because his work is so widely reproduced and

he's so incredibly famous, does that mean he's actually any good?

I'm going to try and find the answer.

My first stop is the O2 Arena in London.

Good or bad, Warhol's art is worth a fortune today.

This box contains one of his works, which is going on show here before being auctioned.

It's a portrait of Michael Jackson, made by Warhol in 1984.

It bears all the hallmarks of a classic Warhol.

It's a print, with brushstrokes of paint layered on top

based not on Jackson himself, but on a photo of him.

Warhol simplifies everything,

detail is replaced by strong, garish colours.

It's almost cartoon-like.

It both reduces Jackson's face

to a mask, but also fixes it for ever in a burst of colour.

The work can still pull in the crowds.

So what is it about Andy Warhol and his art that continues

to fascinate so many?

I've come to Pittsburgh in the heart of industrial America.

Andy Warhol was born here in 1928,

and the city is certainly proud of its son.

His work and his image are everywhere - there's even a bridge named after him.

While I'm visiting, Pittsburgh is having a moment of glory,

hosting the world's leaders for the G20 summit.

And the spouses of the presidents and prime ministers are being given

a tour of the Andy Warhol Museum.

This is the bus that's going to the Andy Warhol Museum, so I'd better get on it.

This is the Andy Warhol Bridge, and the museum is over by the river -

we'll be able to see it in a second.

The museum is huge - seven floors dedicated to Warhol's work.

Here we go, this is Gordon Brown's wife just getting out of the car.

This is the wife of the French President, Carla Bruni,

one of the most stylish women in the world - Andy would have loved to have made her portrait.

Hi, Carla, do you like Andy Warhol?

Sorry? Are you a fan of Andy Warhol? Yes, I am, definitely. What do you like about his art?

I like everything, I like very much the Velvet Underground and I'd like to see the Museum in Pittsburgh.

Do you think Andy would have liked to have made your portrait?

I don't know. He made one of Jackie Kennedy, and now you're one of the most stylish women in the world.

I don't know, but every time he would shoot, or make a portrait of anyone it would just be brilliant.

Thank you so much. Have a good day.

That was her.

I think he would have liked to have made her portrait.

I thought she looked very... I feel a bit like Andy,

very intoxicated with the magic of the stardust that's sprinkled over the other side of the barricade.

Today, Andy Warhol's associated with glamour, celebrity and decadence,

but his childhood was very different.

His parents were poor Slovakian immigrants and Andrew Warhola

grew up in a slum ghetto during the Great Depression of the '30s,

when Pittsburgh was a dirty, industrial, steelmaking city.

This museum recreates life in the tenements where immigrant families like Andy's lived.

Food was often scarce, and Andy's mum would sometimes make soup out of water and ketchup.

A tin of Campbell's tomato soup was a real treat.

Andy later said that his childhood home was the most terrible place he'd ever been.

When he was eight, he was struck down with a neurological disorder

which kept him off school for nearly a year.

It left him with the poor skin and thin hair

that always embarrassed him, and a shyness he never overcame.

He became an anxious social outcast,

and rarely left the apartment.

His mother, Julia, lavished attention on him,

providing movie magazines, colouring-in books, comics and cut-out paper dolls.

All of them influenced his work in later life.

It's almost as if the kitchen became his first artist's studio, with his mum as his assistant.

She would reward him with a chocolate bar when he finished a good drawing,

and encourage him to make collages, colour in, and read to him in her thick Czechoslovakian accent.

Along with his glamorous movie magazines Andy's only other escape from his drab and dreary life

in the tenements was regular visits to church.

Religion played a big part in Andy's life, growing up.

He spent weekends with his mother worshipping at church,

gazing at the golden screens with their Byzantine icons.

During those grey Depression years these formed the rich imagery of his childhood.

It seems to me that Andy's two childhood passions - Catholic religion and the movie stars

in his magazines, later fused in his art where celebrities became icons and the objects of worship.

All the lonely months Andy spent in the tenements with his colouring books and collages paid off.

He won a place at a local art college and just a week

after graduation, he escaped from the Pittsburgh ghetto.

Andy moved to New York in 1949,

aged 21, with only a small suitcase and some samples of his work.

He dreamt of becoming a famous artist, but in the meantime,

just hoped to make a living as a commercial illustrator.

He'd arrived in one of the most exciting cities on earth, at the threshold of the fabulous '50s.

The boutiques of Fifth Avenue blazened a new style of luxury.

Andy was desperate to join in this glamorous world -

it was tantalisingly close, but still out of reach.

With only $200 in his pocket, Andy arrived here in the Lower East Side

and moved into a dingy tenement building that had no hot water

and was crawling with cockroaches.

But he was edging ever closer to his dream.

The New York he dreamt of was just uptown, and soon enough,

Andy made his way to meet the sophisticated art directors

of the city's fashion magazines, carrying a portfolio of his drawings in a tatty brown paper bag.

Andy's persistence began to pay off when Glamour magazine asked him

to illustrate a feature aptly called Success is a Job in New York.

They liked his whimsical drawings, with their quirky, charming figures.

But further success didn't come immediately for Andy, who spent much

of his time hanging out in a pretty coffee-shop called Serendipity.

This was a popular haunt of all his favourite movie stars - Marilyn Monroe even had her own table here.

And it's still going - recently, Madonna threw a birthday party for her daughter here.

Lovely, thank you very much.

When he was broke, Andy would knock off drawings like these and swap them for pastries and ice-cream.

Serendipity was an oasis for Andy where he could sit and gaze across

the tables at Marlene Dietrich,

and Marilyn, and indulge his fantasies of life amongst the stars.

The owner of the cafe, Steven Bruce,

was one of the first people to recognise the potential

in Andy's drawings.

Hi, I'm Stephen Bruce, welcome to Serendipity. You're the owner.

Yes, I am, and I see you have our favourite drink, which was Andy Warhol's favourite drink.

He liked this one, did he? Frozen hot chocolate and lemon ice box pie.

Is that what it is? My God. Yes. Madison Avenue was just a few doors away and he was trying to sell

all his art work to Madison Avenue advertising people. This sort of stuff?

Yes, and he started coming in and having a cappuccino and showing me his rejects - he was very sad,

because they didn't buy anything and I said well, there are some wonderful shoes here, let's frame them.

So we did, we put them on the walls of Serendipity.

Was this his first exhibition?

First exhibition, yes.

We sold them for $25.

We did split, he got $12.50, I got $12.50.

Back in the '50s, when Andy was coming here, what was he like?

In those days, he was called Raggedy Andy.

He was very preppy, he just came from school.

He had his own hair then, and he had a very weak eyes,

so he had very dark glasses on and sometimes he would put

cardboard punctured with hatpins

so he could see out and the light would filter through.

He was too sensitive to light? Very sensitive to light.

Maybe that explains why he always wore sunglasses throughout his life.

Exactly, and I think also that's why he liked wonderful colour.

Andy's eye for colour landed him work with a company

supplying leather to designers, run by Teddy and Arthur Eidelman.

Hi, I'm Alastair. My goodness.

How are you? You must be Teddy.

I'm so happy to see you. Welcome.

I am happy we have a chance to show you our wonderful world of leather.

They'd use him during the '50s, not just as an illustrator,

but also as a consultant, coming up with marketing ideas.

How easy was he to work with? If you said to him, "I need something quickly", was he accommodating?

100 per cent. Quick, sensational,

always on the button.

On time and no ego.

Amazing. No ego at all?

He'd come in with these terrible-looking portfolios,

black portfolios, all a mess, and he would open it up and he would have maybe five suggestions.

Usually we loved at least one, or two, but if we didn't, it was no problem.

He'd say, "That's OK" - that was a big sentence - and he'd bring it back and come back the next day

with the perfect answer, because he was so smart, so intelligent.

He designed everything from a silver-clad exhibition stand

where he draped the company's leather product over motorbikes,

to the logo that they still use to this day.

How would you describe his talent as a commercial artist? What was his secret?

He always had magic, and he always had an inner kind of charm.

It was never fake.

When you looked at it you got this inside smile which made you

feel wonderful and I think that was part of his magic.

He didn't talk this way, but this was the way he drew.

Andy's quiet demeanour masked an insatiable ambition,

which along with his talent as a commercial illustrator, soon got him noticed.

His delicate, playful drawings had a modern look

that Manhattan's art directors wanted, and the commissions soon started rolling in.

Andy's signature style was the blotted line, a technique he'd developed at college.

I'm going to have a go at it myself.

You're going to see a beautiful shoe appear in front of your very eyes.

Look at this. There's the high heel,

there's the shoe, we'll put a Warhol butterfly on with dots.

That's all on the shiny paper.

Now, we cross our fingers, make sure the ink has transferred, and then, this is the big reveal...

It's not bad. I'm not sure what it looks like.

That could be a Warhol butterfly, but the key point is you see here is the blotted line.

The ink on the shiny paper has transferred to the absorbent paper,

and you get this very beautiful blurry, jagged effect of the line,

which has a printed feel, even though it's incredibly simple.

It's funny how popular that retro Fifties feel still is today.

You see it everywhere, on cards, wrapping paper,

or even on kids' books like this one, Madonna's The English Roses.

What's incredible, flicking through and these illustrations,

is how similar they are to Andy's commercial work.

You see exactly the same sort of uneven, broken, hand-made quality.

The line feels very playful and witty, yet you've got the same candyfloss colours.

I never realised the debt books like these owe to Warhol,

when he was excelling as a commercial designer back in the '50s.

Just compare this drawing by Warhol of a cake -

look how similar they feel with the same colours,

the same quality to that line which feels very hand-made, hand-printed.

By the mid-1950s, Andy's career in commercial illustration was really taking off.

But what he wanted more than ever was to become a famous artist.

So this is pretty hip. This is the historic and bohemian Chelsea Hotel

where Warhol's set used to hang out.

Andy's first illustration after leaving Pittsburgh for this article Success is a Job in New York

now seems incredibly apt because within a couple of years,

he'd become one of the city's hottest commercial artists.

His work had appeared in Glamour, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, he did record sleeves and book jackets

and dressed windows for department stores.

By the time he was 27 he was already making more than $100,000 a year,

which was big money in the '50s.

But he still dreamt of being a real artist.

The cutting-edge artists of the 1950s were people like Mark Rothko

and Jackson Pollock, whose abstract paintings mystified the public.

The famous artists of the time, like Jackson Pollock, were butch and intense.

They expressed their inner turmoil by flinging paint

across huge canvases and brawled over women in taverns in Greenwich Village.

Andy hated them.

He couldn't have been more different, so Andy had to find

his own way to break into the fine art establishment.

For his work to be taken seriously as art, rather than illustration,

it had to be about something.

It had to comment on the world around him and make people look at it differently.

And the world that Andy saw was boom-time America.

This poor kid who had grown up during the Great Depression

was obsessed by the '50s consumer revolution.

The glossy commercials for shiny cars, the new supermarkets crammed

with undreamt-of varieties of food.

He loved this mass-produced world of plenty.

With his commercial background,

Andy thought he could create art that reflected it.

Andy loved Coca-Cola.

He once said, "You know that the President drinks Coke, you know that Liz Taylor drinks Coke,

"and just think, you can drink Coke too, and no amount of money can buy you a better one."

To him this was such a beautiful, quite democratic idea,

that he thought, "Why shouldn't a bottle of Coke be a work of art?"

This is a reproduction, but this is what he created first.

He's left traces of his own hand - you can see all this loose, drippy,

fluid brush strokes which I guess was Andy's way of saying

"despite this being a Coke bottle, this is still a proper painting."

But it doesn't feel quite right.

And the next thing he did was so crucial in his development as an artist, because he created this.

You can tell at once that suddenly here's a much stronger,

bolder style that's all his own.

It might not seem like much,

but deciding to depict a commercial object on canvas

and deciding to present it in this very clean, graphic, mechanical mode

was a huge deal in the art world at the time, and this turned Andy

into the champion of a new movement called Pop Art.

Artists have always painted things

from their everyday lives,

like hay carts.

Vases of flowers.

Bowls of fruit.

What Pop Art said was that stuff from the commercial world

and popular culture could also be art.

And that's how 32 cans of soup

made it onto the walls of America's most important modern art museum.

And these paintings are among the most famous modern art pictures in the world.

With these soup cans, Andy finally managed

to break into the fine art world, with a landmark solo exhibition in 1962.

He started with quite a basic portrait of just tomato soup, but that wasn't enough.

He had old-fashioned tomato rice soup.

This one I like, this is clam chowder Manhattan style, which is tomato-based rather than creamy.

Turkey noodle soup, if you're alone at Christmas, minestrone.

When they were first shown, most people thought they were a joke,

but they really mark Andy's coming-of-age as a pop painter.

The bright colours, the crisp, mechanical technique,

the presentation of a series of nearly identical images,

they were all things Andy would play with again and again.

Like Coca-Cola, Campbell's soup was available to everybody.

Like so much of his later work these paintings were about capitalism,

the consumer society -

really, they're about us.

Andy had begun a revolution,

and what could now be classified as art would never be the same again.

If we needed any evidence that Andy shaped the modern world, this is it.

Here at Tate Modern you can see some of the biggest names in modern art -

people like Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, or Jeff Koons.

And all of their work has been shaped to really quite a great degree by that of Andy Warhol.

Like it or not, we've Andy Warhol to thank for today's artists,

who are obsessed with consumer culture and everyday objects.

Now artists can take anything ordinary - Cola cans,

designer trainers,

Japanese cartoons, stick them in a gallery and declare it art.

It's still highly controversial,

so imagine the storm it caused when Andy did it back in the Sixties.

'Through his art, Andy Warhol was exploring the power of branding and marketing.

'He now realised that to achieve his dreams of celebrity he also had to rebrand and market himself.'

After he'd taken the art world by storm, Andy decided he wanted

to become a star on a much bigger stage.

He used to put on what he called his "Andy Suit", which was an act

he performed in public for the rest of his life.

Stylist Brix Smith-Start understands how clothes can transform

a person's public image, and she's going to show me how Andy did it.

Hello, I'm Alastair.

Good to meet you. Nice to meet you.

I really want to find out from you what Andy meant when he talked about his Andy Suit.

Andy Warhol needed to create a persona that people would remember,

a persona that would help him promote his art and celebrity.

To use himself almost as a work of art, and this is how he did it, he did it with fashion.

Andy Warhol was the master of the makeover, and there's a few different eras of Andy I want to show you.

I pulled out some photographs.

I want to start with this one, which is the 1950s.

He's not cool at all here.

No, this was the time in the '50s when he was just trying so hard to be successful and dragging his art

around Madison Avenue, and he was kind of like dressed how everybody dressed in those days.

They used to call him Raggedy Andy, because he had the same suit that he wore over and over again,

and he had holes in his shoes. So that was him then.

But almost overnight he totally reinvented himself into this.

Iconic, super-cool, the Factory-days Andy.

He had loads of different wigs that he customised himself,

so he had different wigs for different moods, kind of like Cher!

It's amazing he got away with this because it's so obviously a wig.

I know, but that is what cemented his image into people's mentalities. Like a brand?

Like a brand, he created himself as a brand.

In fact, it's been said that Andy Warhol's greatest piece of art is Andy Warhol.

When I knew you were coming here I thought it would be a great idea to dress you up like Andy Warhol,

so I've pulled a couple of different looks from his different eras. Great!

You don't look that thrilled.

Aren't you excited? I'm thrilled.

My mum would be so proud!

This is going to be the peak of my career, I think.

Thank you. All right, let's have a look at you.

I'm only really halfway there.

That's brilliant! Do you think? Let's put on the wig.

Of course. Andy would never be seen without these. What do you think?

I think it's great, you have to come and have a look.

How do you feel? I love it.

What's quite good about is it's a bit like a costume. Yeah! Clearly, in my case. It's an Andy Suit.

I suddenly understand that he would kind of put this gear on and it allowed him to play a role, right?

Yes. Gee, golly, and he'd often kind of go...

Yes, you've got it! You've so got it.

# Turn and face the strain Ch-ch-changes... #

The new, rebranded Andy Warhol was now ready to face the world,

and his next artistic venture would bring him all the attention he craved.

So after soup cans and Coke bottles, what did Andy do next to really shake up the art world?

He put on a show that looked, well, pretty much like this.

Andy transformed a really ritzy upscale New York gallery, basically,

into a supermarket, and filled it with Brillo boxes, cartons of apple juice and packets of cornflakes.

It was about as far from traditional painting on a wall as art could get.

For the show, he printed plywood replicas of the original cardboard boxes.

Some thought it a brilliantly ironic comment on art and modern consumer culture.

Many others thought it was ridiculous,

and quite possibly a fraud.

The strange interviews Andy gave didn't really clarify the situation.

The Canadian government spokesman said your art could not be described

as original sculpture, would you agree with that?

Yes. Why do you agree?

Well, because it's not original.

You have just copied a common item?

Yes. Why have you bothered to do that?

Why not create something new? Because it's easier to do.

It was the start of the Andy persona,

not just the wig and the glasses, but his weird, deadpan manner.

It was a strange way to make yourself famous, but it actually worked - the more mysterious

and enigmatic Andy was, the more people were drawn to him.

So isn't this sort of a joke thing you are playing on the public?

No. It gives me something to do.

Andy's flippant manner and infuriating answers unleashed a storm in the art world and beyond.

But his supporters believed he was doing something important,

questioning the need for art to be original, arguing that it was the idea behind an art work

that mattered, not necessarily the skill used to make it.

Andy's Brillo boxes were brash, irreverent and mass-produced,

just like the modern world he saw around him.

To reinforce his rejection of craft and originality in his art,

Andy started calling his studio The Factory.

He removed himself almost completely from the hands-on creation of his work,

increasingly using an industrial process he'd discovered

in the early 1960s called silkscreen printing.

To assist him,

Andy brought in an expert printer, Gerard Malanga -

I'm going to meet up with him.

He brought you on board because you were an expert in silkscreening?

Correct, yes. Why was it such a perfect technique for him?

When you look at a silkscreen print, whether it's on paper, or canvas,

what you are looking at is a painted photograph.

This was a natural development from the blotted line technique

Andy had used as a commercial artist.

But silkscreen printing was an industrial process mainly used for creating wallpaper.

It was perfect for making mass-produced art about a mass-produced world.

OK, that's good...

Gerard's going to show me how to make a silkscreen self-portrait in true Andy style.

He'd say, "Oh, that's beautiful".

He said that about everything! We place our blank silk screen, covered

in emulsion, over the blown-up photograph, and expose it to light.

It's quite heavy.

Then I have to turn on the vacuum?

Yeah. It transfers the image in reverse onto the screen.

Right, so now we've a stencil, which is a negative of the positive acetate.

I see. And then when you put ink through it...

You recreate the positive image.

Take the top off the ink.

I've got to be careful not to spill it everywhere. Just like this?

Yes, that's fine, a little bit more.

OK, now get your squeegee....

sweep it real fast.

The technique allows the artist to build up multiple layers of colour, transforming the original photograph

into something new, showing us how the artist sees the subject.

Let's see what I've done.

Wow! Look how perfect that is!

Well, it's not bad for our first attempt. It's too perfect!

So number two, this is still wet.

So you think Andy would have liked that? Oh yeah.

I used to call these the divine accidents.

And he sort of went with that idea, that this just doesn't matter?

I look like a pink mouse with lipstick. I'm not sure I like it much.

No, no, but there's less pink. You see, there's more pink in that.

This is OK. I like this much better than this one.

The silkscreen process became Andy's trademark.

It allowed him to create some of the most recognisable images in the world -

Mick Jagger...

Jackie Onassis... His cow wallpaper...

Chairman Mao...

and Marilyn.

These are images that are never going to go away.

In August 1962, movie star Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose,

and Andy immediately decided to make a series of portraits of her.

He used the exciting new silkscreen technique which he'd discovered earlier that summer,

and the 24 pictures of Marilyn would combine two of his favourite themes - death and celebrity.

And, for me,

this one's simply stunning.

At first glance, Marilyn looks incredibly beautiful, even precious,

like one of the gold-leafed religious icons that Andy saw in church as a boy.

But something isn't right.

The silkscreen allowed him to offset the layers of paint,

so the edges smudge and blur, creating an eerie, haunting quality.

The colourful mask, covering the colourless photograph,

echoing Marilyn's glittering media-created image that hid the profound sadness beneath.

The colours of her eyelids and lips look like make-up applied by a child.

Marilyn's face is distorted, just as the media distorted her image.

There's a sadness which chimes with our knowledge of her early death.

In the Marilyns, the photograph is always the same, but the effect

changes from tragic to electrifying,

from glamour to innocence,

reflecting the many masks

that Marilyn wore to hide the real her.

As well as celebrity, the Marilyns are also about death,

which you can see in this other, haunting version.

It fades, from colour to black and white, almost as if she's washed away.

It's like the transition of Marilyn Monroe from this life to the next.

Death and celebrity are still constantly explored in modern art.

Marc Quinn is one of Britain's most successful artists

and, like many others, he's inspired by Warhol.

And this is one of your statues of Kate Moss? That's right, yeah.

Now this isn't the one that you made actually from gold.

No, this is bronze. All of your series about Kate Moss,

you must have been thinking about Warhol's Marilyns when you were making them.

Absolutely, who's the kind of female divinity of the moment?

And it struck me that perhaps in the '60s, for Warhol, it was Marilyn, and now it was Kate.

And is this the same thing that Warhol was driving at with those Marilyns?

I mean, what I love about that image

is that it crystallises these twin obsessions of Warhol - celebrity on the one hand and death on the other.

It just seems that those are two very, very meaty, weighty,

resonant themes which are still very attractive to artists working today.

I agree, celebrity and death are both two sides of the same coin, in a way,

because celebrity is about immortality.

It's about aspiring to perfection, getting to a Mount Olympus, a better place. Only populated by stars?

Yeah, which is now OK! magazine.

So it's a kind of parody of these classic and classical obsessions

that are part of the human psyche.

But it's not just artists who still feed off Warhol.

Today, he's a multi-million-pound business, as fashion brands ranging

from Versace to Pepe Jeans endlessly recycle his imagery.

Andy once said that department stores were the new museums.

He realised that shopping would obsess the coming generation,

and he wanted to be right at the heart of this glossy new era.

Today, nearly 50 years after his glory days as a pop artist, his work

has moved out of the gallery and into our everyday lives.

It's so strong, so reproducible, that it appears everywhere.

With Andy Warhol, high art became a brand.

His art about modern consumer culture had become part of it.

Like an in-vogue fashion label, Warhol and his brand can still stamp cool on to anything -

even this pool in a boutique hotel.

And the cover of Madonna's 2009 greatest-hits album, Celebration.

But what is it about Andy's images that makes them so popular today?

I've come to ad agency McCann Erickson to ask Faris Yakob.

What I really want to know is, why am I wearing a T-shirt printed with Andy Warhol's face

nearly 50 years after he was making this kind of imagery?

He was brilliant at branding, he was very consciously using

some of the tricks and strategies of advertising,

but it feels like he was much more intuitive about it, like it was a much more natural thing.

I think he was really ahead of his time in looking at how endlessly replicating your own image

changes how people see you and stuff, and Facebook is an obvious example.

The idea of personal branding kind of used to make me feel about nauseous,

because it seems very artificial,

but now everybody is putting pictures of themselves online and expressing themselves on Twitter and Facebook

and lots of different platforms, so, inevitably, whether or not

you think you're creating a brand, you are creating a brand.

But now people take Warhol's image in vain all the time.

Actually within the Mac's

installed application, there's a way to Warholise yourself.

Right.

What does it involve? Well, I'll grab a picture of you and I will show you.

So we'll take a picture.

Oh, wow, look!

So we can create a Warhol image right now.

OK, are you ready?

Shall I do a little...

Do an Andy finger.

Great.

I've seen lots of these on Facebook.

It's almost become more popular than putting up your own image.

It's as if it gives you instant credibility and cool.

It's appropriating cool from Andy.

People first started trying

to appropriate Andy's cool in the 1960s.

Then, a growing celebrity-hungry entourage

began hanging out at his silver-foil covered studio - The Factory.

This was more than just a place where Andy made art.

It became the high temple of New York's wild underground scene.

Outside was still a world of men in suits, ladies in pretty dresses,

cocktail parties and polite restraint,

while at The Factory, the Swinging Sixties were being created.

Freaks hung out with Hollywood stars like Jane Fonda in an outrageous,

drug-fuelled, gender-bending circus,

and Andy Warhol would watch.

Today, some survivors from the Silver Factory years,

like Gerard Malanga, still get together.

Billy Name is another veteran from those drug-crazed days,

who famously locked himself in a store room for a year.

Later on, I get the impression that the Factory

wasn't always a happy place, that sometimes it was quite...

there were difficult days, drama...

There was drama that went on, but it's no different from in your own family, you know.

But if it was like a family, what role do you think about Andy played?

Because it strikes me as not very much like a dad. Well, it was more like a family on a TV show.

Everyone was a character,

so Andy would have been the Wizard,

the magician, the magnetic centre.

The cameras are already rolling?

In the summer of 1963, Andy bought his first hand-held movie camera, and started shooting films,

and not long afterwards he made his first screen tests - three-minute film portraits of Factory regulars,

and beautiful and famous visitors. People like Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dali,

everyone who was anyone in the early '60s in New York.

The only thing that Andy would tell them was to stare directly at the camera.

Whatever else they did was up to them.

The screen tests were like moving portraits.

Using film to make art was another important leap that Andy made,

a further break from traditional art.

Now, Susan, smile.

Say "cheese".

Can we do a cheese movie?

All you've to do is say, "cheese, cheese..."

All right. The next one could be a cheese movie.

Here, Warhol's filming the writer and activist Susan Sontag.

Billy Name remembers exactly how Andy would stage his screen tests.

If you want a real Andy Warhol screen test, there's a specific set-up.

This feels like an interrogation.

It's sort of like Andy Warhol S&M, yeah.

Yeah, right, it's a bit sadistic. Let's take a look at that lighting.

It's kind of bright!

Well, it's only going to be, what, how many minutes? Four minutes, three minutes?

It's the anarchist.

Three minutes feels like hours.

Sitting with that black eye boring into you, you feel incredibly self-conscious and exposed.

It's like a condensed version of Big Brother -

the unwavering, penetrating gaze of the camera stripping off the mask

to reveal the real person underneath.

The first voyeuristic reality TV.

I'd like to know why so many people chose to put themselves through this for Andy.

So I'm on my way to meet the interior designer, Nicky Haslam, who's a celebrity in his own right,

and he knew Andy in the Sixties and often visited the Silver Factory.

I'm hoping he's going to be able to paint a picture of what the scene at the time was all about.

Nicky? Hello.

Good to meet you. How are you?

I'm very well.

This place looks ridiculously lavish and grand. God.

Yes, it would have been a good place to entertain Andy when he was in London.

I bet he'd have loved this.

So you went along to the famous Factory, the Silver Factory?

Yes, I did, I went to the Silver Factory quite often. What was he like in those days?

He did have that sort of aura that conferred a kind of genuine happiness

on to you that made you feel famous for 15 minutes.

So glamorous.

It was like being sort of touched by the god of fame.

Just... you don't have to do anything.

Do you think he was a real voyeur? I'm sure he was a voyeur, in every sense of the word.

He was kind of outside himself looking in.

Andy didn't want to be the centre of things, he wanted to watch and see other people's reactions,

and how other people lived their life.

He was oddly shockable, Andy.

He was shockable? Yeah, he loved being shocked, that's the point.

As well as the screen tests, he started making other films

about the most boring aspects of human life, like people sleeping.

Your first major picture was called Sleep, and I believe it was

eight hours' straight filming of a man asleep.

Yes, it was John Giorno.

He's sort of a telephone poet

in New York now.

Why did you decide to just shoot somebody sleeping for eight hours?

He just said that he sleeps so soundly, and you could just put...

he falls asleep and he left his door open in New York,

which is so strange.

He just left his front door open and you could just walk right in.

Maybe you think it's a bit crass,

but when I think of people watching 24-hour coverage

of the Big Brother house and seeing people asleep,

I sort of think that wouldn't be there if it wasn't for Andy Warhol making Sleep in the early Sixties.

Well, it's probably true to say there is a very, very strong link, and Andy's sort of genius

was in making the banal and the trivial interesting.

All the films that he made,

they've become kind of the footprint of reality TV, in a sense.

Was that his gift, he could draw out the superstar in all of us?

Yes, I think you've put your finger on it.

I think he thought everybody had a point and that somewhere in everybody

was the superstar quality

that he could mine,

and make interesting.

So, Andy Warhol realised that, with enough exposure, anybody could be a celebrity.

Before anyone else, Andy saw what was coming -

a new global phenomenon of celebrity like it had ever been before.

He coined the term "superstar".

Well, it's all part of it, I have my whole brand, I have a business, so, the more attention the better.

Andy's prophecy was that there would be a new kind of person.

He instinctively realised that anyone who could find a way to get in front of the camera

would automatically become a celebrity. He looked into the future and saw not only Paris Hilton,

but Jade Goody and Susan Boyle.

I've broken the mirror. Correct.

Now, she's a middle-aged volunteer church-worker from Blackburn in Scotland...

Andy discovered that he could manufacture celebrity, and his experiments in film

proved that he no longer had to restrict himself to paintings.

In 1965, Andy had announced that he was going to leave painting behind

altogether and concentrate on a whole raft of different projects.

In the same year, he began to manage Lou Reed and John Cale's band, The Velvet Underground.

And this is the classic banana record sleeve that he designed for

their album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which was released in 1967.

As producer for the Velvet Underground, Andy said he wanted to create the biggest discotheque

in the world, combining music, film and performance.

The band played with his movies projected onto walls and his beautiful entourage dancing.

Encouraging them to let go and experiment with their sound, Warhol

created a blueprint for a new style of multimedia music performance.

Up to now, most bands had looked a bit like this.

But the Velvet Underground inspired musicians like David Bowie

to really let loose with wild and outlandish performances.

Bowie paid tribute in his song, Andy Warhol.

# Andy Warhol Looks a scream

# Hang him on my wall

# Andy Warhol, Silver Screen

# Can't tell them apart At all... #

Some people claim that the Velvet Underground were almost as influential as the Beatles.

Of course it wasn't just Bowie who was inspired by them, and he was obsessed with Warhol.

You could say that the whole punk rock movement in the '70s

owed a massive debt to Warhol's Factory scene as well.

Andy had come a long way from Pittsburgh.

He'd realised his dreams and become an American icon in his own right.

But he was about to learn for himself the price of celebrity.

In June 1968, a mentally unstable young feminist

called Valerie Solanas, who'd actually appeared in one of Andy's films and was the founder

and sole member of SCUM, or the Society for Cutting Up Men,

arrived at the Factory with two guns hidden in a brown paper bag.

She shot Andy, almost killing him.

As he later said, he was just in the wrong place at the right time.

It's ironic that, throughout his career, Andy had been fascinated by violent death.

He'd even created an entire series

exploring the subject, known as the Death and Disaster paintings.

This one, from 1963, is one of the best of the lot.

It shows a gruesome tabloid photograph of a car crash repeated 14 times.

The first thing that hits you is its unflinching, in-your-face power.

The repeated images have this jittery quality, like film rushing through a camera.

It gives a sense of speed, of action unfolding, a sense of time.

Look closely - you can see a corpse slumped in the passenger seat.

It's horrible, and completely at odds with the jaunty orange background.

So was Andy being heartless?

I don't think so, just honest.

He's trying to tell us something fundamental about our times.

The power of this painting is in the repetition.

Andy wanted to imitate what he saw happening in newspapers

and on television, that unending flow of news reports covering all sorts of catastrophes -

not just car crashes, but plane disaters, suicides.

Andy was completely mesmerised by the footage showing President Kennedy at the moment of his death,

which was repeatedly played on national television, and he was right to be.

Nearly 40 years on, think of the footage of the planes going into the Twin Towers.

It was replayed on our television screens again and again and again.

As always, Andy refused to talk about the meaning behind these works.

He'd just say, "Oh, they're about nothing", leaving it to art critics

like me to argue that the car crashes and electric chairs are serious comments on our time.

I think the Death and Disaster paintings are his best work, and they've become incredibly valuable.

In 2007, Warhol's Green Car Crash

sold for $72 million.

Art and money have always gone hand in hand,

but Andy's behaviour in later life made some question whether for him it was just about the money.

Andy's own personal disaster,

the shooting of '68,

has an incredibly profound effect on him.

Afterwards, he was completely transformed as an artist.

He smartened up his entourage and became brazenly interested in making as much money as he possibly could.

He even said in 1975 that good business is the best art.

For the next 20 years, everything became business.

Andy became a professional party-goer, a shameless stalwart of the celebrity circuit.

He had a TV chat show,

and joined a model agency.

Became court painter to the rich and famous, and appeared in everything

from Japanese TV commercials to pop videos.

And he even launched a celebrity magazine called Interview.

It's still going strong today.

It was the precursor to celeb gossip mags like Hello, Heat and OK!

All this makes many wonder whether Warhol's art was ever a comment on

celebrity and consumer culture, or just a part of it.

But others, like Nick Cullinan from the Tate Gallery,

believe even Andy's TV ads should be seen as art.

The turning point for Warhol was the shooting, wasn't it? I think so.

Can you give me a bit of a sense of the scope of what he was doing later in his life, in the '70s and '80s?

I think throughout the '70s and '80s you see a widening

in his practice, so he picks up making paintings again, but he does that alongside

making films, but then dabbling in a whole realm of activities.

What's he doing here? Is this an ad?

This is his ad for TDK, the tape firm, that he made for Japan.

So you see him performing his trademark Warhol persona with

the fright wig, the sort of deadpan persona.

HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

What's this doing in an art gallery? You know, there are ads on telly

the whole time, but we don't privilege them and say it's a work of art. Why is this a work of art?

Well, this one's special because this is an artist making an ad for telly,

and the thing is that we wanted to show his paintings, his works of art

that you see there, for example, alongside these activities.

HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

And what do you say to people who might be a bit like, "Oh, God, isn't this emperor's new clothes?

"Come on, I can see how painting is a work of art, or sculpture, but TV ads?

"He probably got a big cheque for doing that".

He probably got a bigger cheque for the painting. Well, that's true!

I think the thing is that perhaps we've moved beyond the idea that artists can only make paintings

or artists have to be sincere, they have to suffer.

Artists can now, thanks to Warhol, inhabit a whole different realm

of activities and personas, and that's what we wanted to look at.

I think that's Andy Warhol's indisputable legacy.

He threw open the doors, and now, in art, anything goes.

He may indeed have sold out in later life and bought into the celebrity circus, and you can even question

his motivations, but there's no denying the incredible impact his work has had on our modern world.

One person who never doubted his brilliance is the movie star Dennis Hopper, a lifelong friend.

Hopper is a keen artist as well as an actor, and I've come

to meet him at an exhibition of his paintings and photographs.

Dominating the room is Hopper's painting of Andy, and alongside

is a collection of intimate photographs from the Factory days.

OK, so this is Andy, Gregory Markopoulos, Taylor Mead, Gerard Malanga and Jack Smith.

Why was he so drawn to doing this thing of... The repetition? Yes.

Our media, with all the media that we have today, it is like repetition.

Especially now that we've 24-hour news, man.

I mean, how many times can Michael Jackson die, you know?

It's just on and on. Andy, if he were alive, he'd be making work about that. That would be his big thing.

Right, it would be repetitive, repetitive images.

But we're talking about whether he's a prophet.

I mean, to me, that seems like he really is looking forward and foretelling what's going to happen.

He understood how the media culture works.

I don't think art is so much about foretelling what's going to happen as

it is recording your own time and what's happening in your time.

Maybe when I say, Duchamp said that the artist in the future would be a person who points his finger.

He won't be a painter, he'll say that's art and it'll be art.

It doesn't matter how it gets on the canvas or how it gets there, the artist says it's art.

Now how do you become an artist?

Well, OK. But Andy was an artist.

And to me he did finger point our society.

The soup can, the cartoon, the disasters, the electric chair, our morals, everything is like

pretty much, our consumer reality,

it's all in Andy's work.

In 1986, Andy created quite a sombre series of self-portraits that

lots of people described as looking a bit like death masks.

He did die the following year, just from a routine operation.

He was only 58. But you know, for me, Andy completely redefined the role of the artist.

Just look at what he achieved,

and you see that he genuinely changed art for ever.

He told us that something like a portrait

can tell us as much about ourselves, about our own obsessions and desires,

about our media-saturated age, as it could about the sitter.

Or he took things, really banal, humble objects, like a can of tomato soup or a Brillo box, the kind

of stuff you pick up in a supermarket, and made it question the very nature of art.

of stuff you pick up in a supermarket, and made it question the very nature of art.

He took art out of the gallery and into the world around us, into so many different fields like music,

or film, publishing even, and in doing that, he freed up other artists to do exactly the same.

Of course, more than any other artist, Andy Warhol was obsessed

with pointing out how much we're in thrall to celebrity.

He told us who we are and what we would become, and showed us that art can illuminate these things.

He was pointing the finger - at all of us.

If you'd like to find out more about the art and the influence of Matisse, Picasso, Dali and Warhol,

then go online to bbc.co.uk/modernmasters.

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