Warhol's Working Class

This is the first study of the importance of class in Andy Warhol's artwork. During the early 1960s, as the idea advanced that fixed classes were a mirage and status an individual achievement, Warhol's Pop art appropriated images, techniques, and technologies that have long been described as generically "American" or "middle-class." Grudin, however, demonstrate that these images and techniques--soup cans, comic book ads, and silk screening, for example--were in fact closely associated with the American working class. Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to the top of the advertising industry in New York City, Warhol understood and exploited the intense appeal that popular culture held for aspiring audiences. Grudin traces Warhol's sensitivity to this tension by examining his diverse output: how he used mass-cultural signs (Coca-Cola, paint-by-numbers, popular dance steps) to produce paintings and photographs as well as films, writing, performance, and music.