Background and career
Andy Warhol ( ; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist and filmmaker. Widely regarded as the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, Warhol's practice spanned various media, including painting, filmmaking, photography, publishing, and performance art. A leading figure in the pop art movement, his work explores the relationship between advertising, consumerism, mass media, and celebrity culture. His embrace of mechanical reproduction challenged traditional boundaries between high and low culture. He is also credited with popularizing the expression "15 minutes of fame". Born to working-class Rusyn immigrant parents in Pittsburgh, Warhol began his career as a commercial artist in New York before transitioning to fine art. Among his best-known early silkscreen paintings are Campbell's Soup Can (1961–62), Marilyn Diptych (1962), and Coca-Cola (3) (1962). In the mid-1960s, Warhol began devoting his attention to creating experimental films such as Blow Job (1964) and Empire (1965). He subsequently directed a number of underground films—including Chelsea Girls (1966), Four Stars (1967), and Blue Movie (1969)—featuring a shifting group of personalities known as Warhol superstars. His studio, the Factory, became a hub for avant-garde experimentation, bringing together drag queens, poets, bohemians, musicians, and wealthy patrons. Warhol also managed the influential rock band the Velvet Underground, who performed at his Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67) multimedia events. After Warhol survived an assassination attempt in 1968, the Factory evolved into a business enterprise. He founded Interview magazine, produced the play Pork (1971), and published various books such as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) and Popism (1980). He executed several series of paintings—notably Mao (1972–73), Athletes (1977), and Last Supper (1986)—and commissioned portraiture, while expanding into television with Andy Warhol's TV (1980–83) and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes (1985–87). He meticulously documented his social life through photography and daily recordings, published posthumously as The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989). Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 58 following gallbladder surgery in 1987. Warhol has been described as the "bellwether of the art market", with several of his works ranking among the most expensive paintings ever sold. In 2013, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) sold for $105 million. In 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold for $195 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of his art and archives, is the largest in the United States dedicated to a single artist.
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola Jr. on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the fourth child of Andrej Varchola (Americanized as Andrew Warhola; c. 1886–1942 and Julia Warhola (née Zavacky, 1891–1972). His parents were working-class Rusyn emigrants from Mikó, Austria-Hungary (now Miková in northeast Slovakia). In 1912, Warhol's father emigrated to the United States and found work in a coal mine. His wife joined him nine years later in 1921. The family lived at 55 Beelen Street and later at 3252 Dawson Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. They were Ruthenian Catholic and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Warhol had two older brothers, Paul (1922–2014) and John (1925–2010), as well as an older sister, Maria (1912; died in infancy). Warhol's nephew James Warhola, became a successful children's book illustrator. At the age of eight, Warhol had a streptococcal infection that led to scarlet fever. Because there were no antibiotics to treat the illness, it progressed to rheumatic fever and ultimately the neurological condition Sydenham's chorea, sometimes referred to as St. Vitus’ Dance. At times he was confined to bed and made to remain home from school. He would spend these days drawing, creating scrapbooks from Hollywood magazines, and cutting out images from comic books that his mother bought him. He also enjoyed using the family's Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera, and after noticing his passion for photography, his father and brothers built a darkroom in the basement for him.
When Warhol started art classes at Holmes School in 1937, his teacher recognized his talent and arranged for him to attend Saturday drawing classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In May 1942, as Warhol was preparing to graduate from Holmes School, his father died of tubercular peritonitis, after having years earlier drunk contaminated water from a coal mine in West Virginia. Warhol attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, where he excelled academically and artistically. His tenth-grade art teacher, Mary Adeline McKibbin encouraged him to enter a national Scholastic Corporation's art contest, which she also helped organize locally. The competition drew high school entries from across the United States, with tens of thousands of works submitted and regional selections exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art. McKibbin later claimed Warhol won a Scholastic award. However, biographer Blake Gopnik notes that contemporary coverage of the 1944 and 1945 contests suggests he did not receive a major prize, scholarship, or War Bond award. At most, Warhol appears to have earned an unpublicized "honorable mention," the gold pin for which he reportedly still wore in the 1980s. After graduating from Schenley High School in 1945, Warhol won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. While working as a produce huckster in 1946, Warhol created a series of pen-and-ink drawings satirizing his customers and documenting social contrasts encountered during his route, from affluent to working-class families. His illustrations depicted everyday interactions and behaviors, including demands from "new rich" customers and chaotic scenes involving families and children. The series won one of the annual Leisser Art Fund awards, valued at $40, which were given annually to Carnegie Tech students for the best visual representations of their summer activities. Warhol described this job as a "wonderful experience" and said that "people are funny," offering an early indication of his interest in observing everyday behavior and social interaction. As a student, Warhol worked part-time as a window dresser at Horne's department store and was reportedly threatened with expulsion on several occasions due to his attendance record. He also served as art director of the student art magazine, Cano, illustrating a cover in 1948 and a full-page interior illustration in 1949. These are believed to be his first two published artworks. Warhol earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949.
After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in June 1949, Warhol moved to New York City with his classmate Philip Pearlstein. They lived in a sixth-floor walk-up tenement building on St. Mark's Place near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. On his second day in New York, Warhol visited Tina Fredericks, art director of Glamour magazine, whom he had met during a brief visit the previous year. He presented her with a portfolio of work from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and Fredericks purchased a $10 drawing of an orchestra. She subsequently commissioned him to produce shoe illustrations for the September 1949 issue, marking the beginning of his career as a commercial artist. The issue featured a page of Warhol's shoe illustrations alongside pages illustrating the "ladder of success" for the magazine's feature "What Is Success?" Warhol continued contributing illustrations to Glamour and several other leading fashion magazines, including Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar, as well as doing covers for Dance Magazine and Interiors. In the early 1950s, he befriended television designers including NBC peacock designer John J. Graham and CBS set designer Charles Lisanby, who became one of his closest companions. Lisanby said that Warhol was interested in his television work and wanted to follow artists such as Ben Shahn who occasionally worked in the medium. Around this time, Warhol met gallerist Alexander Iolas, who organized his first solo exhibition, Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote, at the Hugo Gallery in New York in 1952. In May 1952, while working as a freelance artist, Warhol won an Art Directors Club Medal for his illustration promoting CBS Radio's Nation's Nightmare, a program about teenage drug addiction. He was subsequently featured in the organization's annual exhibition almost every year for the next decade. By 1953, CBS director of graphic design Georg Olden had named Warhol one of the twelve leading title card artists in television, citing his title design for the Studio One episode "Letter of Love." The following year, American Artist reproduced the design as an example of the program's use of established artists for television. In 1954, Warhol exhibited his work on multiple occasions at Vito Giallo's Loft Gallery in New York. ARTnews observed that Warhol had "developed an original style of line drawing," noting that his technique produced "the effect of the reverse side of a negative, although his lines are broken and the spaces not clouded." His "blotted line" technique combined aspects of printmaking and graphite drawing on paper. Within a year, Warhol—then working out of his railroad apartment on East 34th Street—invited Giallo to become his first paid studio assistant. In 1955, Warhol created illustrated backdrops for a television performance by jazz bandleader Duke Ellington on the CBS program Music '55. The following year he designed weather drawings for the CBS show Good Morning! with Will Rogers Jr.
In 1955, Warhol began designing advertisements for the shoe manufacturer Israel Miller. His drawings for I. Miller attracted considerable attention and earned him the Art Directors Club Award for Distinctive Merit in 1956. Photographer John Coplans recalled that "nobody drew shoes the way Andy did. He somehow gave each shoe a temperament of its own, a sort of sly, Toulouse-Lautrec kind of sophistication, but the shape and the style came through accurately and the buckle was always in the right place." Warhol's distinctive style had made him widely recognized as a fashion illustrator. His hand-drawn images appeared regularly in high fashion magazines and the society pages of The New York Times. Art directors favored Warhol because he worked quickly, met deadlines, and readily accepted revisions. He became so busy that he had to turn down assignments. In a 1956 interview with Mademoiselle, Warhol described his approach to combining commercial and fine art: "Every time I draw a shoe for a job, I do an illustration for myself." He acknowledged that "you almost have to specialize to get assignments," but noted that most New York art directors were eager to "give you a chance to do things." Warhol's personal illustrations were whimsical shoe designs embellished with gold leaf, and each represented a famous figure such as Truman Capote, Kate Smith, James Dean, Julie Andrews, Elvis Presley, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. They sold for $50 to $225 apiece when they were presented at the Bodley Gallery in New York in December 1956. In 1956, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) politely declined Warhol's gift of his drawing Shoe, citing limited storage space and asking him to retrieve it. Nevertheless, that same year one of his shoe drawings was included in MoMA's Recent Drawings U.S.A. group exhibition, marking Warhol's first museum showing. That year, he traveled around the world with his friend, Charles Lisanby, studying art and culture in several countries. While in Kyoto, Japan, Warhol drew a stylized portrait of business tycoon Madame Helena Rubinstein. Warhol habitually used the expedient of tracing photographs projected with an epidiascope. Using prints by Edward Wallowitch, the photographs would undergo a subtle transformation during Warhol's often cursory tracing of contours and hatching of shadows. Warhol used Wallowitch's photograph Young Man Smoking a Cigarette (c. 1956) to design for a book cover he submitted to Simon and Schuster for the Walter Ross pulp novel The Immortal, and later used others for his series of paintings.
To promote himself as an artist, Warhol produced and distributed self-published books of his illustrations, including 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (1957) and A Gold Book (1957), which he gave to potential clients and contacts to generate work. He frequently incorporated calligraphy by his mother, Julia Warhola, to accompany his drawings. With the rapid expansion of the record industry, RCA Records hired Warhol to design album covers and promotional materials. In March 1959, he participated in a fanciful exhibition of table settings at the Tiffany & Co. store in Manhattan. He created a children's party setting featuring a purple donkey with a crêpe-paper tail, gilded pop bottles, and silver porringers filled with vanilla ice cream with oversized sterling silver serving spoons beside them. At a time when traditional artists rarely purchased the work of their peers, Warhol actively collected it. For additional income, gallery artists typically did commercial work, such as window displays, and avoided using their real names because it was frowned upon. In contrast, Warhol gained recognition as a commercial artist, which caused tension with other artists. In 1960, Warhol purchased a Victorian townhouse at 1342 Lexington Avenue, now part of the Hardenbergh/Rhinelander Historic District, in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. He used the house as both a residence and a studio, and his mother lived in the basement apartment. Warhol's work in Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cook Book (1961) featured his illustrations at a time when photography was beginning to replace drawn imagery in commercial media. He would soon draw on his experience as a commercial artist as he transitioned to fine art.
