Mendieta & Warhol

Both Ana Mendieta and Andy Warhol are very distinguished and important artists to the art world. As an artist should, they have been able to make huge statements about and to the world – which has affected the society around them. 

Self Portrait, C. 1978 By Andy Warhol

As a young boy, Andy Warhol was encouraged by his mother to work and focus on his artwork. It can be said that Warhol was very inspired by the 18 portraits found in St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. In his documentary it is stated “what he was seeing was a grid of portraits of the saints, very two dimensional with gold leaf backgrounds and perhaps 9 on either side which is so much like his work, especially his portraits. They have this simplicity and this sense of color and this iconic quality.” Due to having contracted Chorea, a fatal disease centered in the nervous system, he was removed from school. His mother transformed the family dining from into a 24-hour sickroom and Warhol passed his time by painting and cutting out photos of media stars. At the age of nine, he was enrolled in art classes and was gifted his first camera. Those in his family knew that Andy was special. In fact, when his father passed away, he had left his saved up $1,500 to pay for Andy’s college tuition, despite the fact that there were 4 children in total in the Warhol household. 


His themes included consumerism, celebrity culture, and art itself. Warhol produced what would be considered his most iconic work during the 1960s, and he also became the leader of the Pop Art scene. In an attempt to paint something that was the essence of nothing, Warhol began to paint soup cans. By painting these soup cans, he was able to transform a simple everyday object into something more complex, by being the first to use silk screening in his paintings. This painting Campbell’s Soup Cans was almost as popular as many of his other works, including Eight Elvises and The Shot Marilyns.








Ana Mendieta is such an interesting individual. Like Warhol, Mendieta’s work was heavily influenced by her surroundings and the way she was brought up. By having to immigrate to the United States from Havana, Cuba at 12 years old, Mendieta herself states she was “torn away frim the womb from the motherland, and might be one of the reasons why I have went back and worked with nature.” This lead Mendieta to inventing an art form known as Earth Body. Here, she used media and performance to work and become one with the land and nature. The themes that she explored included rebirth, transformation, transcendence, and regeneration.

 Mendieta is also known for having being an intersectional feminist. She used her body in her work to provoke and challenge the ideas of the male gaze. John Berger reveals that “the female nude in Western painting was there to feed an appetite of male sexual desire. She existed to be looked at, posed in such a way that her body was displayed to the eye of the viewer”. So instead of being seen as an “object” for the male gaze Mendieta transposes the relationship to make herself and women in general a subject of her own gaze.

Works Cited

“Ana Mendieta Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist-mendieta-ana.htm.

“Andy Warhol, Art History & Styles of Art.” Art.com Wiki, blog.art.com/artwiki/~/andy-warhol/.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. British Broadcasting Corp., 2012.

Galerie Rudolfinum. “Ana Mendieta.” Youtube, Youtube, 3 Nov. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Nk0sPfRrU.

The Art Channel. “Andy Warhol Documentary Film Part 1 of 2.” YouTube, YouTube, 9 Nov. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQXpqQO4vaE.