Andy Warhol: Cowboys and Indians at VFA

Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.
— Andy Warhol

Before Andy Warhol became the iconic Andy Warhol, he was the most successful, highly paid and in demand commercial illustrator in New York. His skill as a fine artist is sometimes overlooked because of his skill as a Pop artist who took familiar images and transformed them into bold works of art.

In the 1980s, Warhol created several series of screenprints that focused on iconic themes. One was the Ads Series, created in 1985, that focused on the symbols of some of America’s major corporations like Disney, Apple and Volkswagen.

It was actually Steve Jobs who introduced Warhol to the computer. Jobs brought a Mac to a party at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s home and showed Warhol how to use the pencil tool to draw. Warhol got his own computer in 1986, just a year before he died.

Before the Ads Series, Warhol was commissioned by New York gallery owners and environmental activists, Ronald and Frayda Feldman, to create a series of works that depicted endangered animals from around the world. The Feldmans had spoken with Warhol about ecological issues and the idea of the Endangered Species Series was born. Andy Warhol: Endangered Species, still relevant forty years later, has been on exhibit at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut this summer.

One of the last series that Warhol created before his death in 1987, was the Cowboys and Indians Series. What distinguishes this series from others, is the starkness behind each portrait. He chose ro portray both real and mythical cowboys and Native Americans. The images were chosen for their status in poplar culture. Warhol may or may not have known their back stories, or even the connections among them. Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, for example, both worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1884. They became very close friends and mutual admirers. Sitting Bull symbolically "adopted" Oakley as his daughter in 1884, and named her Little Sure Shot.

Andy Warhol’s work as an artist was his business and he took the business aspect of his work seriously. The cover sheets that he created for each series, available at VFA, show the care and organization involved in the business side of the art. Warhol attributes the works to the photographers whose images he used; interesting in light of the recent copyright case brought against the Warhol Foundation for copyright infringement.

Portraits of Annie Oakley and General Custer from the Cowboys and Indian Series are available at VFA. Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Andy Warhol.