

He was hailed as the leader of the pop art movement, in which Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others depicted “popular” images such as a soup can or comic strip as a means of fusing high and low culture and commenting on both.Īlthough shy and soft-spoken, Warhol attracted dozens of followers who were anything but. These prints, accomplished through his use of a silk-screen technique, displayed multiple versions of the same image in bright colors and became his trademark. In 1963, he dispensed with the paintbrush and began mass-producing images of consumer goods and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. In 1962, he received notoriety in the art world when his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap-pad boxes were exhibited in Los Angeles and New York. He liked ordinary things, such as comic strips, canned soup, and soft drinks, and so he painted them.

He began painting in the late 1950s and took literally the advice of an art teacher who said he should paint the things he liked. After being incorrectly credited as “Warhol” under an early published drawing, he decided to permanently remove the “a” from his last name. That year, he moved to New York City, where he found work as a commercial illustrator. “I never give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I’m asked.” He enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and graduated with a degree in pictorial design in 1949. “I’d prefer to remain a mystery,” he once said. For years, there was confusion as to his exact date and place of birth because Warhol gave conflicting accounts of these details, probably out of embarrassment of his provincial origins. Warhol was the son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and his father was a coal miner.

A frail and diminutive man with a shock of silver-blond hair, Warhol was a major pioneer of the pop art movement of the 1960s but later outgrew that role to become a cultural icon. Andy Warhol, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, is born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
