1 Introduction

In 2002, a survey of studies published since 1980 found that art scholars considered Jackson Pollock the most important American artist (Galenson, 2002). In 2018, a similar survey of studies published since 2000 found that Andy Warhol placed first, ahead of Pollock (Galenson, 2018a). This paper explores when and why Andy Warhol has become the most important American modern artist.

2 Rankings

Critical rankings of the most important American modern artists were created by counting the reproductions of artists’ work in textbooks or other surveys of art history. Robert Jensen (2007:33) explained that “Because art historians use textbooks to introduce students to both the materials and the methods of the discipline, these texts represent the consensus view of what has been considered important in the art surveyed.” Consulting large numbers of texts draws on the judgments of scores of art historians and critics as to the most important painters, and this method has now been used by a number of scholars.

The 2002 ranking was based on 56 books published during 1980–2001. Table 1 presents the six leading painters in that ranking. They include the two leading Abstract Expressionists (Pollock and de Kooning), the two artists who initiated the conceptual revolution that followed (Johns and Rauschenberg), and the two leading Pop artists (Warhol and Lichtenstein).

Table 1 2002 Ranking of American Modern Artists.
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The 2018 ranking was based on 55 books published during 2000–18. Table 2 shows the ranking of the same six artists listed in Table 1. Their ordering has now changed. Whereas in the earlier ranking Warhol placed third behind Pollock and Johns, in the more recent ranking Warhol stands first.

Table 2 2018 Ranking of American Modern Artists.
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The change is dramatic. Pollock was the acknowledged leader of the Abstract Expressionists, who gained international recognition as the most important painters of their era. Warhol was also the acknowledged leader of a movement, Pop art, that was widely recognized as the most important of its time. Yet Pollock’s position ahead of Warhol in the 2002 ranking appeared understandable in view of the fact that Abstract Expressionism achieved the remarkable feat of changing the geography of the art world, by breaking the century-old monopoly of Paris as the center of western advanced art and establishing New York as the new capital. Although Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and their peers did succeed in creating an artistic revolution, by changing the dominant paradigm of the art world from experimental to conceptual, they did not bear the additional burden that Abstract Expressionism had carried, of having to demonstrate that American artists could be the leaders of western art. The achievement was epic, for Pollock and a handful of others not only had to overcome the hostility and condescension of powerful European artists and critics, but also had to convince a skeptical and indifferent American public that truly innovative art could be made in New York, developing their techniques in an isolation that the critic Clement Greenberg (1968:170) described in 1947 as “inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning.” The story of their struggles looms large: the critic David Sylvester (1997:353) described Abstract Expressionism as a movement steeped in legend—“legendary hopes, legendary deeds, legendary battles, legendary rags to riches, legendary drinking and, alas, legendary deaths.” That Andy Warhol could overtake the most celebrated member of this movement to become the most important American artist is therefore a remarkable feat.

Table 1 shows that in 2002 Warhol was already recognized as the most important Pop artist, ahead of Roy Lichtenstein. A key question for this study is how Warhol subsequently came to be considered more important than both Pollock and Johns. The first step will be to locate more precisely when this change occurred.

2.1 The rankings extended and disaggregated

As noted above, the rankings of both Tables 1 and 2 were derived from surveys of art history published over periods of approximately two decades. To obtain a more precise view of how the critical assessment of Warhol has changed over time, this section will modify that method in two ways. First, the dates of the books analyzed will be extended: instead of beginning with books published in 1980, books from the preceding two decades will also be examined. And second, the evidence of all the books will be presented by the decade of publication, instead of two-decade periods.

To assess Warhol’s changing position over time, in each decade his illustrations can be compared to those of the other five artists who appear in Tables 1 and 2. This comparison is shown in Table 3.

Table 3 Numbers of Illustrations of Works by American Artists, by Decade.
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It is not surprising that Lichtenstein and Warhol both trailed the other artists in books published in the 1960s: Pollock and de Kooning had made their greatest contributions in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and Johns and Rauschenberg in the ‘50s, but Pop art did not begin until the early ‘60s, so the art world had had less time to react to Pop, and scholars had had less time to judge its importance (Galenson, 2018b). It is notable, however, that Lichtenstein’s illustrations from the ‘60s placed him ahead of Warhol. This soon ceased to be true, however, as Warhol ranked marginally above Lichtenstein in the ‘70s, and by a modestly larger margin in the ‘80s. Warhol’s advantage over Lichtenstein became large in the ‘90s, larger in the’00s, and larger still in the ‘10s, as in that decade Warhol had two and a half times as many illustrations as Lichtenstein. Thus it appears that in was in the ‘90s that Warhol came to be clearly recognized as the leading Pop artist, and that that recognition grew stronger in the decades that followed.

Warhol ranked far behind the other four artists in the ‘60s, but by the ‘70s his illustrations were similar to those of Johns, de Kooning, and Rauschenberg, and the same was true in the ‘80s. Pollock ranked first overall throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. But a significant change occurred in the ’90s, as Warhol remained well behind Pollock, but now ranked well ahead of the other four.

Table 3 thus suggests that the 1990s were a key turning point in Warhol’s critical evaluation; it was in that decade that he clearly emerged in the narratives as the most important Pop artist and as second only to Pollock in overall importance. His ascent then continued, as he narrowly surpassed Pollock in the 2000s, and held the top position by a larger margin in the 2010s.

3 Prices

Warhol’s recent importance in the auction market is well known. So for example during 2000-17, 85 of his paintings each sold at auction for more than $10 million—more than twice as many as those of any other American artist, and more than 30% of all modern American paintings that reached this price during this period (Galenson, 2018a).

But of course Warhol’s paintings were not always so highly prized. At his first solo exhibition of paintings, at Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery in 1962, his portraits of Campbell’s soup cans were priced at $100 each, just a tenth of what he was then receiving for a commercial drawing, and only six were bought by collectors. And when Irving Blum, the gallery owner, decided he wanted to keep the paintings together as a set, Warhol agreed to sell him all 32 for a total of $1,000. Although Eleanor Ward, who presented Warhol’s first New York exhibition later that year, recalled that his art was “accepted instantly with wild enthusiasm,” prices remained modest: William Seitz, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, bought a portrait of Marilyn Monroe for the museum for $250, and the architect Philip Johnson bought Gold Marilyn for $800 (Bockris, 1997:148-56).

Warhol’s prices rose during his lifetime, but the dealer Ronald Feldman, who worked with him in the early ‘80s, recalled that “Andy always thought that his prices should have been higher (Pratt, 1997:168).” His position in the market remained uncertain: a 1982 exhibition of his painting of dollar signs at Leo Castelli’s gallery failed to sell a single work. In 1983, Warhol complained in his diary that an early painting scheduled for auction was “only estimated at $100,000… And Roy’s things go for five, six, or seven, and Jasper’s go for a million (Hackett, 2014:546).” The 1986 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue offered a sitting in Warhol’s studio for a “portrait of you in the tradition of his museum quality pieces,” for $35,000.

Table 4 presents a summary view of the timing of the rise of Warhol’s prices in the auction market, showing the single highest auction price achieved by his work in each decade, compared to the same measure for Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Lichtenstein. The ordering of the artists in these rankings is understandably more volatile than that of the critical rankings considered above, largely because important works by Pollock and Johns do not come to auction as frequently as those of more prolific painters like de Kooning and Warhol. But the 1990s again appear to have been pivotal for Warhol. Thus he and Lichtenstein were both below the other four artists in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but Warhol’s highest price was above those of all the other artists in the ‘90s and remained in that position hereafter.

Table 4 Single Highest Auction Price for Each American Artist, by Decade.
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Warhol’s dominance of the art market in recent decades has not been limited to the individual paintings represented in Table 4. Considering all auctions actions held during 2000–17, Warhol accounted for 9 of a total of 27 paintings by American artists that sold for more than $30 million, and 85 of 276 that sold for more than $10 million. In each case, he placed first among American artists. So for example his 85 paintings that reached more than $10 million were more than double the 41 by Mark Rothko, the 36 by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the 31 by de Kooning, and the 25 by Lichtenstein—the four artists who followed him in this ranking (Galenson, 2018a). The enormous volume of Warhol’s work—prints and photographs as well as paintings—in fact gives him a quantitative position in the art market that is not approached by his American rivals. In the two decades 2000–19, a total of 27, 188 works by Warhol in all media were sold at auction, compared to 9, 017 by Lichtenstein, 5, 585 by Rauschenberg, 2, 992 by Johns, 1, 981 by de Kooning, and 251 by Pollock. The ubiquity of Warhol’s work prompted the dealer Richard Polsky (2003:119) to describe his art as “the unifying element in the world of contemporary art.”

3.1 Critics

Critical evaluation of Warhol’s art has never reached a consensus, but the balance of critical views has shifted over time, from predominantly negative to positive. The basic themes can be briefly summarized.

From the beginning, one criticism was the charge of ephemerality. Thus in 1962 Michael Fried doubted “that even the best of Warhol’s work can much outlast the journalism on which it is forced to depend (Pratt, 1997:2).” Closely related was tedium, as in the same year Jules Langener contended that the momentary shock of Warhol’s art quickly disappeared, “leaving one as bored with the painting as with the object it presents (Madoff, 1997:33).” A third persistent theme was that Warhol was unoriginal, as for example in 1971 John Canaday described Warhol as “a manipulator…of borrowed material rather than a creator of his own (Pratt, 1997:75).”

Condemnation of Warhol’s openly avowed desire for fame and fortune was often combined with other criticisms. In 1965, for example, Thomas Hess deplored Warhol’s superficiality and venality, declaring that he made “empty metaphysical vessels that are continually being filled with real money (Madoff, 1997:281).” Three decades later, in 1995, Kimball (2003:215–20) echoed this charge, describing Warhol as “one of the most notorious art hucksters of our time” and asserting that his “true genius was for commerce and publicity, not art.” Some critics extended this opinion into the judgment that Warhol was not an artist at all, as for example in 1977 Rosenberg (1985:137) described him as “the artist changed into media celebrity and manufacturer of art substitutes.”

When Warhol died in 1987, Calvin Tomkins, (1989 :69) contended that his great fame had little to do with his art: “He was neither the best nor the most popular artist of his era.” Interestingly, Tomkins cited Warhol’s prices in support of his claim, adding that “his prices—a reliable barometer in the commercialized art world that Warhol did so much to foster—did not keep pace with those of several of his less famous contemporaries.” In 2011, Brian Appleyard (2011) echoed Tomkins’ belief, predicting that in time “the idea that Warhol is a greater artist than, say, Robert Rauschenberg or Jackson Pollock will be seen as the absurdity that it is.” Since Warhol’s prices had risen to great heights, Appleyard could not use them in support of his opinion, but he dismissed them, predicting that “The bubble will burst, prices will fall.”

Early critical praise for Warhol was scarce, but in 1966 Lippard (1966:100) wrote that he was “one of the most important artists working today,” and that he was “greatly admired by many younger artists.” Crone (1970:9) opened the first substantial catalogue of Warhol’s art in 1970 by declaring that he was “the most important living artist in North America for the history of the visual arts and film, yet almost no critical work on him has recognized this fact.”

As the awareness of Warhol’s importance grew over time, perhaps the most surprising endorsement of his art was that of the philosopher and critic Arthur Danto, who proclaimed in 1989 that Warhol was “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.” Danto contended that Warhol had successfully transfigured commonplace objects into art, revealing in the process that a philosophical definition of art could not have a visual basis. Danto considered this revelation so fundamental that “When the final multivolume Popular History of Art is published, ours will be the Age of Warhol.” In 2009, Danto explained that Picasso had been the most important artist of the first half of the twentieth century, and Warhol the most important of the second half (Pratt, 1997:201–7; Danto, 2005:9,365; Danto, 2009:4,48).

In recent decades, Schjeldahl (2000:102) has stressed Warhol’s persisting importance. In 2000, he reflected that “Warhol’s great moment was brief,” but “his peak performance stands higher and higher, while everything that once seemed to contest it falls away.” Two years later, he mused that “Warhol, fifteen years after his death, remains a contemporary; the revolution in taste that he set off in 1962, his year of miracles, rolls on.” Asking rhetorically how decisively Warhol had broken with tradition, Schjeldahl (2008:163–4) responded that “To travel back to art before 1962 requires a tourist visa.” In 2018, Schjeldahl (2018) observed that Warhol’s impact remained ubiquitous: “Trends in art come and go like the weather. The several that Andy Warhol initiated six decades ago constitute a climate unabated by time…Love him or hate him,…he is inescapable.”

The critical literature on Andy Warhol is both large and varied: it remains true that, as Cresap (2004:110) wrote in 2004, “Many years after his death Warhol continues to polarize experts.” But the opinions of scholars and critics do not determine artistic importance. This proposition might appear to undermine the empirical basis of this study, which used studies by scholars and critics to measure artistic importance. But there is in fact no contradiction. In their surveys of art history, scholars painstakingly record the canon of the discipline, describing and illustrating the contributions of the innovators who have transformed art from generation to generation. But recording an intellectual genealogy is not the same thing as creating it. It is artistic innovators who determine artistic importance, and they do this with their art by reacting to and building upon the contributions of their predecessors. This process of selection by practitioners is the true source of artistic importance. And so it is to artists that we must look to understand why and how Warhol’s influence has grown over time.

3.2 Artistic influence

Warhol idolized Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns when he was a commercial artist: he was inspired by their success, and their art had a substantial impact on his early Pop paintings. But Warhol in turn influenced both of them. In 1962, Warhol introduced Rauschenberg to silkscreens. Rauschenberg had previously transferred images by putting lighter fluid on magazine and newspaper photographs, then pressing them onto paper. Warhol showed him that with silkscreens he could enlarge the images, and the technique subsequently became a staple of Rauschenberg’s art (Warhol & Hackett, 1980:29). And although silkscreening was much less important for Johns, the first screen he ever used, in the 1964 painting Arrive/Depart, was one Warhol gave him (Johns, 1996:250).

Warhol’s earliest Pop paintings had an almost immediate impact on a number of younger artists. In 1962 Gerhard Richter, then an art student in Dusseldorff, saw illustrations of Pop paintings by Warhol and Lichtenstein in an art magazine and soon began to base his own paintings on photographs. This became Richter’s (1995:22,138) characteristic practice, and he later explained that Warhol’s paintings were important to him for their “astonishing simplification.” In 2002, Schjeldahl (2008:164) observed that “Richter’s oeuvre may be seen, with some distortion, as a long, complex extrapolation from Warhol.”

Early in his career, Ruscha (2002:138,255) saw Warhol’s first show in Los Angeles in 1962 and was excited by “a real departure, a logical departure from Abstract Expressionism.” Warhol’s art helped Ruscha to flatten his painted surfaces: “Warhol had a real disdain for the surface embellishment… He was able to rid the picture of any kind of sentimentality. That was great.”

Chuck Close recalled seeing an exhibition of Warhol’s work in 1964, the year Close graduated from art school: “I felt wonderful, momentary outrage, yet I was totally won over by seeing the limits and definitions of what art could be.” Close subsequently developed a distinctive method of painting portraits from photographs, and reflected that “We don’t think of Warhol as a figurative painter essentially but that’s a role that he offered, and the fact that he was working from photographs was important (Storr, 1998, 1988:87–9).” Close’s choice of subjects was also influenced by Warhol: “I had to paint anonymous people because Andy owned famous people (Rosenthal, 2012:162).”

A key moment early in Cindy Sherman’s career occurred when she abandoned painting for photography: she went on to create a novel form of photography, using herself to play roles. When an interviewer asked about her influences, she responded, “Definitely Warhol, early on (Respini, 2012:74).” Among Sherman’s numerous commercial activities are self-portraits for a Comme des Garcons ad campaign in 1993 and a portfolio for Harper’s Bazaar in 2016. In 2006, a fashion director marveled that an important artist would feature his product in her photographs, but Warhol had broken that ice decades earlier (Blasberg, 2019).

Warhol’s influence exploded on the New York art world in the 1980s, as a new generation of artists who had grown up with his early work came of age. Anthony Haden-Guest (1996:153) recalled that Warhol’s reputation had faded since the early days of Pop, but made a recovery in the ‘80s: “The revival of Warhol’s fortunes was brought about by the most effective engine in the art world: the continuing interest of younger painters.” Bob Colacello remarked that “the whole approach to being an artist of the eighties came directly from Andy. Salle, Haring, Schnabel—they were like Andy’s children (Hoban, 1999:202).”

Keith Haring wrote in his journal:

Andy’s life and work made my work possible. Andy set the precedent for the possibility of my art to exist…[H]is art and life changed the concept we have of “art and life” in the 20th century….

He reinvented the idea of the life of the artist being Art itself. He challenged the whole notion of the “sacred” definition of art. He blurred the boundaries between art and life so much that they were practically indistinguishable.

Haring (2010:154–8) explained that Warhol “set the precedent for my venture into the commercial world and the popular culture,” providing validation for the “tightrope I am walking between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.” He contended that the origins of Pop art in Warhol’s “honest evolution of his early graphic sensibility” provided a precedent for Graffiti to become a form of advanced art. Haring called Warhol “a teacher for a generation of artists now, and in the future, who grew up on Pop, who watched television since they were born, who ‘understand’ digital knowledge,” and considered him “the most important artist since Picasso.”

For Kenny Scharf, Warhol was “my hero, the reason I came to New York in the first place. He just turned art around and made it fun. I used to call him Papa Pop. He was the father and we were the children (Hoban, 1999:201–2).” Julian Schnabel considered Warhol’s contribution “as great as Jackson Pollock’s—maybe even greater. I loved him and I love his work (Bockris, 1997:464).”

Jean-Michel Basquiat, the brightest star in the firmament of New York’s art world in the ‘80s, idolized Warhol: a friend recalled that “Andy Warhol was the apple of his eye since he was fifteen or sixteen. He wanted Warhol’s fame.” Another friend added, “He always said he was going to be the next Warhol (Hoban, 1999:201).” Basquiat deliberately pursued Warhol, finally gaining his attention in 1982 by painting a dual portrait of Warhol and himself titled Dos Cabezas. The two soon became close friends: the biographer Hoban (1999:204) wrote that “By the time he was twenty-three, Basquiat had realized his fantasy: he was not only Warhol’s protégé but his collaborator and partner; they hung out together, worked out together, painted and partied together.” Warhol’s Pop images influenced Basquiat throughout his career, from his early graffiti to his late canvases. As a result of a dealer’s suggestion, in 1984 Warhol and Basquiat began making paintings together. This was an unusual practice for painters, but over 2 years they coauthored more than 50 paintings. Both were influenced by their joint work, but their relationship ended when Basquiat was stung by a 1985 New York Times review that called their collaboration “one of Warhol’s manipulations,” and referred to Basquiat as an “art- world mascot (Fretz, 2010:140–5).”

Pearlman (2003:143–4) observed that Jeff Koons’ “deadpan embrace of his role as guru of capitalism represents a more aggressive and extreme version of the persona notoriously instigated by the predecessor of all contemporary artists’ media-savvy self-fashioning—Andy Warhol. Koons builds on Warhol’s notorious defiance of the earlier romantic image of the fine artist as expressive individualist…Koons intensified this early 1960s Warhol.” Pearlman contended that Koons’ exaggeration of Warhol’s pose became “his principal means of fashioning his public persona.”

The Italian painter Francesco Clemente moved to New York in the early ‘80s, and soon met Warhol, who became a central influence on his art. Clemente admired Warhol for finding his subjects in “common places,” for his “democratic” approach to the image, and for making his public persona an artistic creation. In 1984, Clemente collaborated with both Warhol and Basquiat on a group of 12 paintings (Percy & Foye, 1990:117–18; Dennison, 1999:29–30).

Basquiat, Haring, and others of their cohort were recognized as important new artists by critics and collectors in the booming New York art market of the ‘80s, and their success prompted a reassessment of Warhol that was intensified by his premature death in 1987. The august Museum of Modern Art, which had shown little interest in Warhol’s art during his lifetime, gave him an extensive retrospective exhibition in 1989, supported by a 500-page catalogue that declared him to be “one of the most serious, and one of the most important, artists of the twentieth century (McShine, 1989:13).” Henry Geldzahler, who had been a close friend and one of Warhol’s earliest art world supporters, observed that the show was “as important for the Modern as it is for Andy…They were a little late in claiming him,” and pointed out that Warhol “had his own personal relationship with the public, something that makes museums nervous (Marquis, 2000:176).” A reviewer of the exhibition wrote in Art of America that “2 years after his death Andy Warhol continues to loom over the contemporary art scene like a silver specter. Everywhere his influence is evident: in the kitschy readymades that critique consumerism; in the easy passage between art-making and fashion, rock music, entertainment, or films; in the celebration of artists as celebrities or stars; and in the endless fascination of the mass media with the art world as a rather bizarre and freewheeling sideshow (Sandler, 1996:555).”

Warhol’s influence continued to spread beyond the ‘80s. The Italian Maurizio Cattelan, who arrived in New York in the early ‘90s, named Picasso and Warhol as his favorite artists, and followed Warhol in blurring the line between art and advertising (Tomkins, 2008:154). Cattelan considered Warhol’s influence pervasive, explaining that “We live in a Warhol world as much as we live in the city of the Empire State Building (Spector, 2011:118).”

In 1990, the Chinese artist Wang Guangyi began a series of large paintings that combined Chinese socialist propaganda images with Pop art. Each painting had the main title Great Criticism, with a subtitle that was the name of a famous western brand. In a special tribute, one of the paintings was subtitled Andy Warhol. In later years, Wang featured Warhol’s name on several more of his paintings (Smith, 2005).

Damien Hirst, the leader of the Young British Artists in the ‘90s, praised Warhol for his honesty in openly avowing his pursuit of fame and fortune, and he has done the same himself. Hirst has assistants execute his paintings, and his statement that he wants his spot paintings “to look like they’ve been made by a person trying to paint like a machine” carries distinct echoes of Warhol’s famous declaration that “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine (Button, 2002:116).”

Takashi Murakami is routinely described as the Japanese Andy Warhol, and although some scholars consider the description simplistic, Murakami himself embraces it. His practices follow and extend Warhol’s in a number of respects, above all in treating art as business. Murakami initially named his Tokyo studio the Hiropon Factory, and staffed it with scores of assistants. He devoted considerable time and effort to developing the theory and practice of Superflat, which has been seen as an extended elaboration of Warhol’s celebrated declaration that “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it (Schimmel, 2007).” Murakami once explained that “Warhol laid the foundations for an art world where artists such as myself and Yoshitomo Nara, armed with contemporary Japanese culture, or even those already at its center, such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, are able to climb free and unrestrained up and down the societal ladder. I have named this unique characteristic ‘superflat,’ as a catchphrase of a theory that I hope will succeed Pop (Rosenthal, 2012:138).” When a journalist asked Murakami what he did not like about Warhol, he replied “I like everything (Thornton, 2008:199).”

Kara Walker recalled seeing a Warhol exhibition in 1981, when she was 12 years old: “The gallery was filled with screen prints of soup cans. I had never seen anything so grand and empty before, and so similar to actual life.” She was intrigued by “the idea that a painting or picture was nothing more than its surface.” To the annoyance of her artist father, “Warhol became my idol for the remainder of my high school years.” Asked about Warhol’s lasting influence on her, she replied, “It’s all too obvious, isn’t it? Just look at the surface of my work. There’s nothing behind it (Atkins & Kivland, 2010; Walker & Nickas, 2004).”

When Weiwei (2011:81) came to the USA to study art in 1981, “The first book I read was The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again). I loved that book. The language is so simple and beautiful.” Ai remained in New York for more than a decade and studied contemporary art and artists, “but to me Warhol always remained the most interesting figure in American art.” He wrote of Warhol, “Understand him, and you will understand the United States.” A number of Ai’s practices, including painting commercial logos on ancient pots and his use of repetition, have been considered extensions of Warhol’s art. He freely acknowledges his debt, as in 2015 he declared that “Warhol is the most important artist of this era, even though he has been gone for more than twenty years (Delany & Shiner, 2015: 6,37,73).”

Warhol’s influence has spread beyond visual art. A prime example is David Bowie. A friend recalled that early in his career Bowie “had such huge admiration for Warhol because of Warhol’s ability to change, to steal. And to not worry about being original. Bowie loved that (Jones, 2018:144).” These practices—consistently creating new personas, and wholesale theft from earlier artists—became central to Bowie’s career. Bowie’s launch of his first persona, Ziggy Stardust, came shortly after he saw a London production of Warhol’s play Pork, and hired four of the cast members. And Bowie’s musical declaration of his commitment to varying his identity, “Changes,” appeared on the same 1971 album as his tribute “Andy Warhol.” When Julian Schnabel directed a biographical movie about Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1996, Bowie played Warhol, wearing wigs and glasses borrowed from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, portraying the artist with what Alison Pearlman (2003:51) called “a baffling degree of accuracy.”

In 2012, New York’s Metropolitan Museum presented an exhibition titled “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” that featured artists “who pay tribute to Warhol…[and] who have absorbed, transformed, or challenged his example.” A 300-page catalogue accompanied the exhibition, which aimed “to present the diversity of response to and continuing debate about the life and work of Andy Warhol.” The show’s curator observed that “Warhol’s protean art would become a veritable mainstream from which many offshoots and points of view would be spawned and significant careers forged (Rosenthal, 2012:6,12).” The theme and scope of that exhibition underscore the point made by the brief survey given here that his impact on contemporary art has been large, diverse, and durable. Many recent artists have been influenced by both practices and behaviors of Warhol that were either widely denounced or largely overlooked during his lifetime. But with the benefit of these artists’ contributions, we can now look back and more clearly identify Warhol’s innovations.

4 Innovations

Warhol’s major formal innovations were introduced in 1962, with the stenciled paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and the silkscreened portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Coca-Cola bottles. Coplans (1970:49) identified two of these innovations: “First, the actual as against the simulated use of an anonymous and mechanical technique, and second, the use of serial forms.” Warhol was of course not the first painter to use either a mechanical technique or serial forms, but he featured these to a much greater extent than any earlier artist had. Sylvester (1997:384–5) identified a third important formal innovation in the early paintings, in the use of photography. He acknowledged that painters had long exploited photography in a variety of ways, but noted that “Warhol went much further. He created an art which would be utterly meaningless to anyone who didn’t realize that it was made from photographs and was about photographs.” One consequence of this was no less than a new conception of painting, as Sylvester observed that “all of Warhol’s mature work is as if inspired by revelation that a modern painter could and should exploit the photograph as Renaissance painters exploited classical antiquities.” These formal innovations have transformed the appearance of advanced art in the past half century.

In the early ‘60s Warhol significantly extended and publicized the practice of painting by proxy. In 1963, he emphasized his personal detachment from the execution of his art by hiring an assistant to make his paintings, calling his new studio the Factory, and declaring in a leading art magazine that “I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.” The process of silk screening, the use of advertisements and news photographs for his images, and the serial repetition of these images all emphasized the absence of the touch of the artist in Warhol’s art, as did his 1963 declaration of his profession as “Factory owner (Goldsmith, 2004:48).” Since the Renaissance, many artists had relied on assistants to help make their works, and beginning in 1960 Yves Klein had made paintings without physically participating in the execution. But in 1969, after Warhol told Time magazine that Brigid Polk had made all his paintings for the past several years, he was forced to issue a public retraction in response to complaints from collectors. Over time, however, it became recognized that assistants had in fact often made Warhol’s paintings: in 1970, he told Emile de Antonio in a filmed interview that Polk had been doing his paintings for the past 3 years, and Gerard Malanga later recalled that he had often worked without Warhol when he had first been hired as an assistant in 1963. Warhol’s practice appears to have been key to overturning a hallowed tradition that the authenticity of a painting was conferred by the touch of the master. Thus in 1995, Takashi Murakami christened his Tokyo studio the Hiropon Factory, and he and several other contemporary artists were known to employ scores of assistants (Schimmel, 2007:68). And there was barely a stir in the art world in 2001 when Jeff Koons told an interviewer that having assistants execute his paintings gave him time “to grow as much as possible as an artist, instead of being tied down in the execution of the work,” or in 2002 when Damien Hirst explained that making his own spot paintings was tedious—“I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it”—and that in any case his assistants did a better job than he could (Sylvester, 2001:351; Hirst & Burn, 2002:90). Interestingly, when David Hockney placed a notice in his 2012 exhibition at London’s Royal Academy stating that all the works “were made by the artist himself, personally,” the ensuing outcry in defense of Hirst prompted the Academy to issue a statement that Hockney’s comments were not intended to criticize any other artist’s working practices (Galenson, 2012).

Warhol was not the first celebrity artist, but he perfected the role. He not only actively and openly courted fame, but he made celebrity a theme of his art: he made paintings of the Hollywood stars he had idolized since childhood, he made movies featuring followers he called Superstars, and he published a magazine in which celebrities were interviewed, often by other celebrities. In 1970, Vogue declared that “For millions, Warhol is the artist personified (Pratt, 1997:60).” He became a model for generations of younger artists of a particular inclination—Bob Colacello recalled that he attracted “narcissists who were into fame and their own stardom (Hoban, 1999:202).” David Bourdon (1989:13) wrote:

By redefining the public’s perception of what a successful artist could be, Warhol became a role model for younger painters who craved publicity more than the respect of their peers. Success in the post-Warhol art world meant not just feverish acclaim and high prices, but also a fame so pervasive that one’s name appears in gossip columns, fashion magazines, and television game shows. These were hardly lofty standards of achievement, but they affected the aspirations of subsequent generations of art students who were less interested in creating serious art than in getting their faces published in the fashion press and living it up in style.

A related innovation was Warhol’s extension of the practice of the artist as trickster. Henry Geldzahler (1994:250) remarked that there was “a quality to Andy Warhol’s public persona that inspires endless discussion, quite unlike that of any other artist.” Marcel Duchamp had created a powerful model for conceptual innovators, in which critical attacks on radical innovations as cynical hoaxes could be turned into a positive force in establishing the importance of the art. The artist’s use of ambiguity and irony to fuel persistent controversy was a key to this transformation. This practice originated with Duchamp’s submission of Fountain, a porcelain urinal, to the 1917 exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists, and its subsequent rejection by the society’s directors. A friend of Duchamp’s, Louise Norton, wrote of this episode that “there are those who anxiously ask, ‘Is he serious or is he joking?’ Perhaps he is both! (Galenson, 2009:192).” Norton’s question was echoed by the director and critic Jonas Mekas, who asked in 1963, “Is Andy Warhol really making movies, or is he playing a joke on us? (Gopnik, 2020:321).” But Warhol took the practice farther than Duchamp, by creating a persona that presented him as the equivalent of the naïve and unsophisticated images of his paintings. Often wearing a silver fright wig, he proclaimed his own lack of intelligence—“I’m not more intelligent than I appear”—and his superficiality: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it (Goldsmith, 2004:90–1).” Warhol’s “naïf—trickster persona” helped to stoke continuing debate over whether his art was serious or a joke, extending his fame far beyond the world of art, and his success inspired a number of later artists to create their own versions of the artistic trickster, including notably Damien Hirst’s cultivation of a public image as a punk hooligan to complement the gruesome sculptures he made from sectioned animals suspended in formaldehyde (Cresap, 2004:5).

A radical Warhol innovation was his open expression of his desire for wealth. Since the Renaissance, artists had virtually universally followed the convention that they should never publicly appear to be concerned with material rewards. Not in the least fazed by this taboo, Warhol was fascinated by money, he loved earning it, and he never hesitated to declare this. His images of currency—including the 7–1/2 foot-long 200 Dollar Bills—were the first silkscreened paintings he made in 1962; he recalled that a friend had asked, “Well, what do you love most?,” and explained, “That’s how I started painting money.” He devised the concept of business art, explicitly describing art as a business and himself as a Business Artist, declaring that “making money is art,” and he wrote of his “Fantasy about Money: I’m walking down the street and I hear somebody say—in a whisper—‘There goes the richest person in the world (Warhol, 1975:92,135).’” Salvador Dali had earlier been ostracized for his violation of this art world prohibition, but Warhol did not hesitate to socialize with Dali, or to declare his fascination with the older artist (Taylor, 2008:24–9). Warhol’s stance later allowed Jeff Koons to claim that “The market is the greatest critic,” Damien Hirst to declare that “the art world’s about money,” and Takashi Murakami to reflect that “I don’t understand why artists pretend as if the market did not exist,” without suffering any damage to their standing in the art world (Galenson, 2009:336–7; Schimmel, 2007:81).

When Picasso invented collage, the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire celebrated the use of nonart materials and subjects for their potential to allow artists to reach more deeply into modern life (Breunig, 2001:279–81). Decades later, Arthur Danto (2009:64) credited Warhol for effectively reaching a limit of this process by “making art out of what was an entirely vernacular object of everyday life.” From Picasso on, a series of artists used new subjects and techniques to bridge what Robert Rauschenberg famously called the gap between art and life, but Danto contended that Warhol had achieved this more conclusively than any other modern artist. This contribution was not of interest only to philosophers of art, for in recent decades many prominent artists have followed Warhol in rejecting or ignoring any distinction between high and low art, both in their embrace of vernacular subject matter and in their use of industrial techniques of fabrication.

A corollary of Warhol’s celebration of mundane subjects—in his words, “images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second…all the great modern things the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all”—was his wish to democratize art (Warhol & Hackett, 1980:3). In an early interview, he declared “I don’t think art should be only for the select few, I think it should be for the mass of American people (Goldsmith, 2004:90).” The widespread popularity of his art made it acceptable for later artists to embrace the goal of reaching a vast public. So Jeff Koons would write that “I want to communicate to as wide a mass as possible,” Damien Hirst would state his desire “to communicate an idea to a hell of a lot of people on a massive scale,” and Takashi Murakami would contend that “art should be exposed to a general audience,” and each in his own way would make art that did gain broad exposure (Koons, 1992:56; Hirst & Burn, 2002:72; Schimmel, 2007:68).

Warhol also innovated in the diversity of his activities. He used his success as a painter to extend his production not only into other genres of visual art, but into entirely different media. David Bourdon (1989:10) recalled that Warhol wanted to be a “jack of all arts”:

It wasn’t enough for him to be recognized as merely an artist, filmmaker, and show business entrepreneur. He fantasized about having a hit movie playing at Radio City Music Hall, a Broadway show at the Winter Garden, a television special, a book on the best-seller list, a Top-40 record, and the cover of Life. He truly believed he could keep several careers going simultaneously, winning acclaim in all of them.

He didn’t achieve all these goals, but he did make movies, publish a novel, manage the rock group The Velvet Underground, and publish Interview magazine. He also developed his own cable television show, made segments for Saturday Night Live, endorsed products, and worked as a celebrity model. Dieter Buchhart recently noted that Warhol’s success in crossing disciplines led Basquiat, Haring, Schnabel, and others to follow his example by working in multiple fields, so that during the ‘80 s “moving between artistic disciplines became a matter of course, anticipating the multidisciplinary work of many artists in the 1990s (Buchhart & Nairne, 2017:14).”

Warhol’s detachment from his art, his trickster persona, his declarations of cupidity, and his mundane subjects were all elements of a broader assault on the very status of the artist in our society. For centuries, artists had been widely regarded as exalted spiritual beings. This was stated as early as 1435, when Alberti (1966:64) contended that “any master painter who sees his works adored will feel himself considered another god,” and it remained current in 1957, when the eminent scholar Meyer Schapiro (1982:226) could describe the artist as “one of the most moral and idealistic of beings.” With characteristic bluntness, Warhol (1975:178) rejected this vision, asking, “Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.” The history of modern art in the half century prior to Warhol was to a great extent a process of creating novel products and practices, testing the boundaries of what art could be and how artists could act. Warhol carried these explorations to a limit, by establishing that virtually anything was possible. Thus after Warhol there was no particular way art had to look, and no particular way artists had to act. In 1989 the conceptual artist John Baldessari declared that Warhol had definitively changed the template for artists who came after him: “The model of the artist as sufferer wielding his brush heroically against the world is no more (McShine, 1989:447).”

Andy Warhol was a radical conceptual innovator in a century characterized by radical artistic conceptual innovation. What sets him apart from nearly all the other major innovators of the century, however, is the remarkable number of innovations he created, that allowed him to influence so many later artists in so many different ways. Conceptual innovations break existing conventions by creating unexpected syntheses of elements that were not previously related. As Schjeldahl (1998:103) observed, “The ‘60 s were about erasing boundaries. Warhol did it best because the boundaries—between high and low, art and commerce, etc.—scarcely existed for him in the first place.” Gerard Malanga, the first assistant Warhol hired to make his silkscreened paintings in 1963, reflected that Warhol’s “role of setting the pace, of being first, by definition meant doing things that had not been done before or that had failed in the past. It necessitated a vicious disregard for tradition and common sense (Bockris, 1997:188).”

4.1 Warhol in western art

Table 5 presents a critical ranking that compared Warhol to the most important western painters of the twentieth century, based on counts of illustrations of these artists’ work in 33 textbooks of art history published during 1990–2005. Warhol ranked eighth overall, behind Picasso, Matisse, four other European artists, and Pollock. Table 6 then presents a ranking of these same artists based on a survey of 34 books published during 2006–18. Warhol’s illustrations now place him ahead not only of Pollock, but also of Mondrian, Malevich, Braque, and (narrowly) Duchamp, and behind only Picasso and Matisse.

Table 5 2005 Ranking of Greatest Western 20th-Century Artists.
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Table 6 2018 Ranking of greatest Western 20th-century artists.
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As was the case in the earlier rankings of American artists, Tables 5 and 6 show that Warhol rose considerably over time in these evaluations. Thus whereas Warhol had 21% as many illustrations as Picasso and 46% as many as Matisse in the earlier ranking, in the later ranking these had risen to 40% and 70%, respectively. The simplest narrative from the ranking of Table 6 is that Picasso and Matisse revolutionized western painting in the first half of the twentieth century, then Warhol revolutionized it in the second half.

This quantitative evidence also serves as a check on some extreme claims concerning Warhol’s importance. Notably, the critic Blake Gopnik (2020:912) closed his recent biography with the judgment that “It’s looking more and more like Warhol has overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the twentieth century. Or at least the two of them share a spot on the top peak of Parnassus.” Table 6 decisively indicates that art scholars do not generally agree, for Picasso continues to command much greater attention than Warhol in their historical surveys.

5 Conclusion

Pop art burst upon the art world in 1962. The evidence of art history textbooks shows that scholars were well aware of its importance within a decade, as in books published during the ‘70 s Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were recognized as the movement’s coequal leaders and placed on a level with the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and the two originators of the conceptual revolution that led to Pop, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Yet Jackson Pollock, the leading Abstract Expressionist, was still clearly considered the greatest American artist. This basic view persisted during the ‘80 s, but a change occurred in the ‘90 s. Pollock remained atop the rankings, but Warhol moved ahead not only of Lichtenstein, but also of de Kooning, Rauschenberg, and Johns. This made him not only the leading Pop artist, but the second most important American artist overall. Warhol’s critical position then continued to rise, as he ranked narrowly ahead of Pollock in the 2000s, and by a wider margin in the 2010s. Warhol’s ascent above his American rivals thus began in the 1990s and continued in the following two decades. The auction market confirms the importance of the ‘90 s for Warhol’s position, as it was during that decade that the auction prices of his paintings rose above those of all the other American painters.

Textbooks and auction outcomes lag behind the actions of participants in the discipline, the artists whose decisions determine the significance of their predecessors. Examining the quantitative evidence of the textbooks and auctions in light of the brief survey given above of leading artists influenced by Warhol therefore suggests that the turning point in the emergence of Warhol’s dominant role in modern art was the 1980s.

Warhol had become influential on younger artists since the time of his first Pop innovations in the early ‘60 s, but not obviously more so than a number of other important American artists. It was in the ‘80 s that a brash new generation of flamboyant young artists announced their takeover of the New York art world, while declaring their allegiance to Warhol. Basquiat, Koons, Haring, Schnabel, and their peers did not make paintings that resembled those of Warhol, nor did they mimic Warhol’s particular adopted persona. But their art and behavior unmistakably reflected what they had learned from Warhol. Thus the simplified figures of Basquiat, the graphic sensibility of Haring, the commercial products of Koons, and the mixture of high and low motifs of Schnabel were all made possible by the earlier mechanical silkscreened images of Warhol. And the same was true of the public images the younger artists constructed: Basquiat’s paint-spattered designer suits were as distinctly a trademark as Warhol’s silver fright wig, and Koons’ self-aggrandizing declarations and open embrace of the moral values of the market were obviously related to Warhol’s earlier immodesty and open pursuit of financial gain, just as were Schnabel’s grandiose and bombastic statements and writings. The inspiration of Warhol was inescapable in the frenetic New York art world of the ‘80 s, both in the works the galleries displayed and in the behavior of the artists who made them.

The art stars of the ‘80 s elevated Warhol through their work and actions, and his influence persisted when Basquiat and his peers were followed by new rising stars in the ‘90 s and beyond. As photography, mechanical reproduction, careerism, business art, and personas tailored to complement specific forms of conceptual innovation became staples of advanced contemporary art, Warhol’s legacy continued to loom over the art world of New York, and those of London, Tokyo, and Beijing, in recent decades. And it is consequently not surprising that scholars now consider Warhol to be not only the leading American painter, but the most important western painter of the second half of the twentieth century, behind only Picasso and Matisse among the greatest painters of the entire century.