Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is one of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century. He is known especially for his silkscreened paintings and experimental films but also for the innovative and controversial ways in which he merged the worlds of art and commerce. Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to working-class immigrants from present-day Slovakia, Warhol was a sickly child with more than a passing interest in celebrities and other mass cultural forms. He studied “pictorial design” at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University), a series of courses that combined fine arts training with more applied skills such as commercial illustration. In 1949, Warhol moved to New York, where he established himself as a successful commercial artist, producing illustrations for clients primarily in the fashion industry. Although he had small gallery exhibitions in the 1950s with works not unlike his commercial output, Warhol began producing paintings in 1960 based on consumer goods (such as Campbell’s soup cans) and other mass media sources (such as newspaper front pages) that were widely viewed as a reaction against the seriousness, existential drama, and machismo attached to abstract expressionism. Alongside artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, Warhol was soon considered to be one of the leaders of what came to be known as pop art. But Warhol’s embrace of the photomechanical silkscreen process in 1962 differentiated him from his peers; by producing paintings through photography, he effectively removed notions of handicraft and traditional notions of authorship from his paintings. That he called his studio the “Factory,” where he produced many portraits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and canvasses based on press images of suicides and car accidents, only solidified this image. By the mid-1960s, Warhol had turned his attention to experimental filmmaking; his works included Empire, an eight-hour static portrait of the Empire State Building from 1964. After surviving an assassination attempt in 1968, he largely turned to making celebrity and commissioned portraits in the early 1970s as well as more commercial films and his monumental silkscreened images of Mao Zedong. In his final decade, he produced a diverse body of paintings, which continued his interest in subjects drawn from popular culture, even as Warhol became more explicit in addressing questions of abstraction in painting. He died in 1987, following routine gallbladder surgery at the age of 58. In addition to his films and paintings, Warhol’s appearance, persona, and quips (such as “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes”) are widely known.