The Andy Warhol Museum, Duquesne and Monongahela Inclines, and Steepest Street in Continental USA?

-- Andy Warhol Museum --

After taking the Carrie Furnaces Tour this morning, I visited the Andy Warhol Museum. I didn't know much about his art except that he painted Campbell Soup cans, so I figured I needed to at least take a photo of one. 😄 This one is a little different because the label is torn.

I can't say Andy Warhol is one of my favorite artists. He did a lot of pop art, which was an art movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The subject matter was often commercial products and items of popular culture, and the art form was typically posters, signs, or canvas. It's not really my thing, but Andy was an icon of the movement.

Andy did a lot of silkscreening. Sometimes he handpainted part of a subject matter and then silkscreened over it. He liked repetition, and silkscreening allowed him to repeat objects easily. He didn't necessarily care how clean or crisp the end product looked, so the paint wasn't always evenly distributed, and when he silkscreened multiple colors, the parts didn't always exactly line up with each other -- but he was okay with that. 

He also dabbled with movie making, and there was a room in the museum where you could select and watch some of his movies on one of a computer screens. I spent a little time that room, but I found the movies boring. Maybe that is why he was famous for his art and not his movies.

I took photos of some of the artwork that caught my eye. I liked the colors and flowing hair on the first one below, which is based on Boticelli's renaissance painting of Birth of Venus.

I liked the S&H Green stamps because I remember them from childhood. The listerine and coke were pleasing product depictions. Notice that they're not perfect -- the silkscreening is uneven on the "Coca-Cola".

The canvas with lifesize repetitive silkscreen images of Elvis Presley took up almost the entire wall. The individual images varied a lot in their intensity.

I liked the flying saucer because was futuristic and looked like something you would see in a science fiction comic book. 

He did a contraversial series of images on America's Most Wanted. The use of dots for shading in the image reminded me of old newspaper photos.

Andy did a series of silkscreens of his friend Bobby Short. I liked the colors, and the facial  expressions he captured so successfully.

The below image of a cat is from a book of illustrations he called "25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy". He created the picture book to show off some of his artwork before he became famous. Andy and his mother lived with many Siamese cats all named Sam. I liked the flowing position of the cat in this image.

I guess I liked a lot of Andy's artwork after all. The museum is seven stories tall, and goes chronologically from top top bottom. The basement has a creative studio where visitors can purchase a blank tee shirt or other item and make their own silkscreen. By the time I made it down to the basement, though, it was too late to start something.

-- Duquesne and Monongahela Inclines --

The Duquesne and Monongahela Inclines are two funiculars that carry people up and down Mount Washington, a mountainside across the river from downtown Pittsburgh.

The cars are pulled up and down the mountain by cables.

The views of the city from the top are amazing! You can really see that Pittsburgh is a city of bridges.

As a side note if you ever visit there, the metered parking lot at the bottom has a two hour minimum. If you park on top, however, and ride the funicular down and back up instead up and then down, the meters on the street at the top are regular parking meters, with a much shorter minimum. The meters at the top don't charge after 6 pm.

-- Steepest Street in Continental USA? --

There are several very steep streets in the neighborhoods on the south side of Mount Washington, on the same side of the river as the funiculars. One of the streets, Canton Avenue, in the Beechview neighborhood, is the steepest officially recorded public street in the United States. The claim of  being steepest is disputed, but Canton Avenue has a 21 foot long section that has a 37% grade.  The Canton Avenue hill is 213 feet long.

Of course I had to drive my car up the street. I put it in low gear and it had no problem doing the climb.

I drove back to Cranberry Township for the night, and plan to drive to Butler, PA, tomorrow.