August 6, 1927 – February 22, 1987
Andy Warhol (Andrew Warhola) was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He began his career as a commercial illustrator in New York, doing artwork for ads and magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. Eventually he crossed from commercial work to art, blurring the line between the two along the way.
In the early 1960s his huge and colorful silk-screen renderings of banal objects like Coke bottles and a Campbell’s Soup can were hugely popular and established him as the leader of the Pop Art movement. His multi-color, multi-image portrait of Marilyn Monroe is another famous image from this era. By the mid-1960s Warhol had become an icon of the psychedelic generation; he made strange and lengthy experimental movies, held famous gatherings in “The Factory,” his Manhattan studio, and surrounded himself with a court of fellow artists and adoring fans. He also worked closely with the experimental rock group The Velvet Underground and (in 1969) founded the influential celebrity magazine Interview.
In 1968, Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) walked into Warhol’s studio and shot the artist. The attack was nearly fatal.
Warhol died in New York on February 22, 1987 after complications from a gallbladder operation. He had set, and then stretched the boundaries of POP ART. Warhol’s depictions of everything from Campbell’s Soup Cans to the faces of celebrities provide an often revealing commentary on contemporary American society. In 1989, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had a major retrospective of his works.