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Andy Warhol

Sep 2
3 min read

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The youngest of three sons, he grew up in a working-class Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant family that practiced Byzantine Catholicism. He studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, graduated in 1949, and moved to New York. During the 1950s he became a successful commercial illustrator. Rather than abandoning advertising when he turned to Pop Art, he transformed its brands, repeated motifs, and reproducible images into fine art.


In 1962, Warhol exhibited Campbell’s Soup Cans: thirty-two canvases, one for each variety then sold by Campbell’s. Although they resemble mechanical copies, the original canvases were largely painted by hand, with stamped details. Later that year he adopted photographic silkscreen, using it with assistants to repeat and alter press photographs and publicity images. Marilyn Diptych, made after Marilyn Monroe’s death, presents the same publicity photograph fifty times, moving from brilliant color to fading black and white. It joins celebrity, mass reproduction, and mortality in a single image.


Warhol’s art was not limited to consumer goods and movie stars. In the Death and Disaster works, he repeatedly printed press images of crashes, suicides, electric chairs, and racial violence. Repetition can intensify the horror while also imitating the numbing circulation of violence through mass media. Warhol rarely tells viewers whether he is celebrating, criticizing, or observing the culture he depicts.


At a succession of New York studios known as the Factory, Warhol worked with assistants, performers, poets, filmmakers, and musicians. The Factory was at once a workplace, film set, business, social scene, and center of queer and avant-garde culture. Warhol made experimental films including Sleep, Empire, Chelsea Girls, and nearly five hundred Screen Tests. He also supported the Velvet Underground, was credited as producer of The Velvet Underground & Nico, designed its banana cover, and presented the band in the multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The collaboration challenged the myth of the solitary artist, although some Factory “Superstars” worked for little or no pay.


On June 3, 1968, writer Valerie Solanas shot and critically wounded Warhol at the Factory. He survived extensive surgery and a long hospitalization but lived with severe physical consequences. Afterward, the Factory became less open and his business operations more controlled.


In 1969, Warhol and journalist John Wilcock co-founded Interview. It began as a film journal before becoming a chronicle of celebrity, art, fashion, music, and nightlife. Its lightly edited, celebrity-to-celebrity conversations helped popularize an intimate style of cultural journalism. Under editor Bob Colacello and cover artist Richard Bernstein, it became a meeting place in print for artists, actors, musicians, designers, and socialites. By deciding who appeared together, Interview helped create the cultural network it reported on.


Warhol was a gay man whose drawings, films, photographs, drag self-portraits, and collaborations with queer performers form an important part of twentieth-century queer cultural history. He also retained elements of his Byzantine Catholic practice, made especially visible in his late series based on Leonardo’s Last Supper. His later work included commissioned portraits, television, Time Capsules, collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and early digital images made on an Amiga computer in 1985.


Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987, at fifty-eight, from complications following gallbladder surgery. A central figure of American Pop Art, he did not create the movement alone. His distinctive achievement was to make the circulation of images itself a subject: how commodities become icons, people become brands, and repetition changes meaning. His use of found photographs, delegated production, film, television, magazines, and self-branding profoundly influenced appropriation and media-based art. The Factory and Interview also showed that publishing, performance, publicity, and social networks could belong to an artist’s practice. In the age of social media and ceaseless digital reproduction, his work appears more relevant—and more unsettling—than ever.



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