Arriving in New York City in the 1950’s, Warhol immediately set about to make something of himself. Indeed, far from the worries his family had that he would fail to adapt to the busy city (very different from his suburban life in Pennsylvania) Warhol embraced his new life, Like many artists of the time, Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator working with esteemed magazines such as Harper's Bazaar. Gaining fame for his blotted line technique, Warhol rapidly rose to success and was highly in demand for his services. Warhol’s signature style, the blotted line technique, was first explored in his college years at Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Eye-catching and different, the method seamlessly blends drawing with the fundamentals of printmaking. Warhol's process began by meticulously reproducing a pencil line drawing onto a sheet of non-absorbent paper, such as tracing paper.
He would then affix this paper to a second sheet, one that would absorb ink, by securing their two edges together with tape on a single side. Armed with a fountain pen, Warhol carefully traced over select portions of the original lines with ink. The magic occurred when he folded the two sheets along the hinge and gently pressed or "blotted" them together. This meticulous procedure yielded the distinctive, punctuated, and fragile lines that became synonymous with Warhol's illustrations. Often, he added vibrant hues to his blotted line creations using watercolour dyes or embellished them with the opulence of gold leaf.
Fast forward a few years and an emboldened Warhol, so the story goes, approached the Museum of Modern Art and proposed that he designed the Christmas cards for the gift shop. These early cards mimic his signature blotted line style with delicate deliberate dancing cherubs, lucious seasonal figures and ornament clad trees.
The success of this early project further progressed his career and, in 1956, Warhol was commissioned by esteemed jewellers Tiffany & Co to design Christmas cards that would be sent to their clients. This collaboration would last until 1962 – the year he started to exhibit his Campbell’s soup works. Perhaps to mark the end of an era, Warhol produced an illustrated gift book with all his whimsical drawings.
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These works blurred the line (no pun intended) between fine art and commercial illustration. With this Warhol would become the king of Christmas creating a perfect vision of a Christmas he would have dreamed of growing up in the working-class neighbourhoods of Pittsburgh.
Warhol even had his very own Christmas miracle. As a young man the artist was obsessed with writer Truman Capote and was telephoning him almost every day. Capote kept dismissing him until, at the approach of Christmas a friend sent him a golden shoe painted by Warhol, dedicated to Capote. Decades later, in 1978, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote were featured in the Christmas issue of High Times dressed in festive garbs. Warhol was dressed as a Santa, and Capote was supposed to be dressed as a little girl. Yet as Warhol recalled in his diaries, “Truman wasn’t in the mood to go into drag, he said that he was already dressed like a little boy."
We can really realise exactly why Christmas interested Warhol as an artist. For he clearly did love it, and really put himself into his card designs. As a child, he did not experience the perfect American Christmas portrayed year after year by the media, instead he used these cultural references, recycled and reimagined, to create his own vision of what a perfect Christmas means.