Andrew Warhola was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh and trained as a commercial illustrator. Moving to New York in the early 1950s he became a successful advertising artist before, in 1962, exhibiting his Campbell's Soup Cans series in Los Angeles. The silkscreen portraits that followed — Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Mao, Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy — used the techniques of mass production to ask whether celebrity, repetition, and disposable images had become the new sacred. His Factory studio in Manhattan, wrapped in tin foil and silver paint, was the centre of New York avant-garde social life through the late 1960s. He produced experimental films (Sleep, Empire, Chelsea Girls), managed the Velvet Underground, was shot and nearly killed in 1968 by Valerie Solanas, and continued working until his death in 1987 from complications after gallbladder surgery.
All Figures
Pop Artist · Filmmaker · Founder of the Factory
Andy Warhol
1,928 CE – 1,987 CE
The Pittsburgh-born son of Slovak immigrants whose silkscreen Marilyns, Campbell's soup cans, and silver-foil-wrapped Manhattan studio redefined what art could look like in the age of mass production.
Lifetime
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