Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol
Walter Mori, Public domain

The icon of Pop Art.

Warhol started out as a commercial illustrator and turned soup cans, Marilyn Monroe and Coca-Cola into art. His studio was called The Factory.

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in 1928 in Pittsburgh. His parents were immigrants from a Rusyn area in what is now Slovakia, and the family was deeply religious. As a child he was often ill and bedridden, reading comics and collecting pictures of film stars. He studied commercial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and moved to New York in 1949.

In the 1950s he became a successful commercial illustrator, known for his shoe illustrations. In 1962 he exhibited 32 paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, one for each flavour, at a gallery in Los Angeles. They are now in the Museum of Modern Art. That same year he began using screen printing and made series of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Coca-Cola bottles and dollar bills. Marilyn Diptych of 1962 is in the Tate in London. He also made dark series of car crashes, electric chairs and suicides.

His studio, The Factory, was lined with silver foil and became a meeting place for artists, musicians, actors and eccentrics. He made long experimental films and produced the rock band The Velvet Underground. In 1968 he was shot and seriously wounded by Valerie Solanas, who had moved on the fringes of the Factory. That same year Moderna Museet in Stockholm staged his first major museum exhibition in Europe. Its catalogue contains the famous statement that in the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.

In the 1970s he devoted much of his time to commissioned portraits of celebrities and wealthy collectors. He had already founded Interview magazine in 1969. In the 1980s he collaborated with the young Jean-Michel Basquiat. He died in 1987 after gall bladder surgery.

Warhol blurred the line between art, advertising, celebrity and business. He himself said that good business is the best art. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh opened in 1994. He is today one of the world’s best-known artists, and his way of reproducing images has influenced art and culture far beyond the art world.