Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on 6 August 1928 in Pittsburgh, to parents who had emigrated from present-day Slovakia. He studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and moved to New York in 1949, where he became one of the most successful commercial illustrators of the 1950s.

In the early 1960s he turned to the imagery of American mass culture: Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, dollar bills and the faces of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, repeated in silkscreen with the deadpan finish of a printed page. The Marilyn series of 1962 and 1967, made from a publicity still for the film ‘Niagara’, became the emblem of Pop Art.

From his studio, the Factory, Warhol ran a production of paintings, prints, films, a magazine (Interview) and the rock band The Velvet Underground, surrounded by a circle of ‘superstars’. He survived a shooting in 1968 and spent the 1970s and 1980s on commissioned portraits, the ‘Oxidation’ and ‘Shadows’ series and collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He died in New York on 22 February 1987 after gall-bladder surgery. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh holds the largest collection of his work; the Foundation that bears his name has authorised later editions of his images, including the Achenbach Art Edition of 1993.