philip PEARLSTEIN
andy WARHOL
"49 Thistle", 1949
3-PIECE LOT
(Andy WARHOL & Philip PEARLSTEIN)
College Yearbook & Graduation Commencement Program/Invite, Carnegie Institute of Technology Carnegie Pittsburgh.
1.) Senior College Yearbook, 1949, Andy's pictured once in the Modern Dance Club. No Individual Photo. Andys Fellow Artist and Friend Philip PEARLSTEIN is pictured individually with the Senior Class.
Condition:
Excellent- slight age toning.
Provenance:
Private Collection, Pittsburgh
2.) Graduation Commencement Program/Invitation, 1949, Carnegie Institute of Technology Carnegie Pittsburgh.
Condition:
Excellent- slight age toning.
Provenance:
Private Collection, Pittsburgh
Note:
After graduating from Schenley High School, he studied painting and design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Warhol originally intended to study art education at the University of Pittsburgh in order to become an art teacher, but he changed his mind and applied to the Carnegie Institute to study pictorial design with the intention of becoming a commercial illustrator. Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design and moved to New York a week after graduating in June 1949 Philip PEARLSTEIN, a friend from college accompanied Warhol to Manhattan. Pearlstein would later go on to become an important realist painter. They had previously visited Manhattan with another student from Carnegie Tech. While at college Warhol had worked in the display department at the Joseph Horne department store. He had also frequented a local gallery called Outlines where he had been exposed to the work of Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Buckminster Fuller. He had also taught art classes at the Irene Kaufmann Settlement while still in college. In Manhattan Warhol and Pearlstein subleased an eighth-floor walkup tenement apartment on St. Mark's Place (and Avenue A) for the summer. According to Pearlstein, "The bathtub was in the kitchen and it was usually full of roaches, incredible roaches." When they moved a few months later to the large front room of dancer FRANCESCA BOAS's loft on West 21st Street, Andy sent out address change cards in small envelopes filled with glitter announcing, "I've moved from one roach-ridden apartment to another." (BC21) One of Andy Warhol's first free-lance jobs was at Glamour magazine. He went on to become an extremely successful commercial artist, working for most of the major fashion magazines throughout the fifties, doing album covers for Columbia records, designing Christmas cards, book jackets and retail ad campaigns, including the famous shoe ads for I. Miller in the mid-fifties. "At the height of his career as a commercial artist, Warhol was earning one hundred thousand dollars a year, a staggering sum for the fifties... on the I. Miller account alone he made fifty thousand dollars one year...Eventually he had to hire assistants to help him keep up with his assignments. He even enlisted the services of his mother, who followed him from Pittsburgh to New York soon after he started making enough money to support them both."