The Beginnings: Warhol the Commercial Illustrator
Before Warhol became synonymous with the Pop Art movement and its vividly-coloured depictions of celebrities and commodities, he was a budding commercial artist navigating the world of advertising and magazine illustration. In these formative years, Warhol’s distinct artistic voice began to emerge, but was embedded within the commercial aesthetics of the time.
Warhol arrived in New York in 1949, after studying commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He quickly found work as an illustrator for popular magazines like Glamour, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. His early drawings showcased delicate lines— often characterised by his innovative ”blotted line” technique — which were perfectly suited for fashion illustrations and advertisements. The blotted line technique merges drawing with elementary printmaking, as Warhol started by replicating a line drawing in pencil onto a non-absorbent surface such as tracing paper. He then secured this tracing paper to a second, more absorbent sheet and, using a fountain pen, traced over a portion of the original lines. Warhol then transferred the ink to the second paper by gently pressing or “blotting” the two sheets together. This method produced the distinctive dotted and fragmented lines emblematic of Warhol’s early illustrations. He frequently added colour to these blotted line drawings using watercolour or adorned them with gold leaf. This technique allowed Warhol to create a bridge between drawing and printing, laying the groundwork for his later forays into silkscreening. It was during this time that lithography, a method of printing based on the immiscibility of oil and water, became an instrumental technique for Warhol. Traditional lithography involves drawing directly onto stone or metal plates with a greasy substance. The image is then inked and pressed onto paper.
Warhol’s use of lithography was well-represented in works like La Recherche du Shoe Perdu, created in the 1950s. This print portfolio features 16 individual shoes, and epitomises Warhol’s whimsicality and wit during his commercial period. The title itself is a playful nod to Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la recherche du temps perdu” in French), but instead of a profound literary exploration, Warhol offers a delightful series dedicated to shoes. The set is a pseudo-storybook of sorts, where each shoe takes on its own character and narrative, captured in fanciful illustrations and accompanied by playful and poetic captions. It was an homage to his days as a shoe illustrator and a teasing hint at the thematic repetitions that would come to define his later work.
These initial years in the commercial realm were crucial for Warhol. They allowed him to refine his techniques, understand mass media’s influence on culture, and develop an acute awareness of the allure of celebrity and consumer goods — themes he would constantly revisit and deconstruct throughout his career in the world of fine art.
