Date of Birth
6 August 1928, Forest City, Pennsylvania, USA
Date of Death
22 February 1987, New York City, New York, USA (complications from gall bladder surgery)
His most famous and commonly used pictures.
Warhol was an US painter, film-maker and author, and a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents had emigrated to the USA from Ruthenia, a region now in the Slovak Republic.
Between 1945 and 1949 Warhol studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1949, he moved to New York and changed his name to Warhol. He worked as a commercial artist for magazines and also designed advertising and window displays.
In the early 1960s, he began to experiment with reproductions based on advertisements, newspaper headlines and other mass-produced images from American popular culture such as Campbell’s soup tins and Coca Cola bottles. In 1962, he began his series portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Other subjects given similar treatment included Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley. The same year he took part in the New Realists exhibition in New York, which was the first important survey of Pop Art.
In 1963, Warhol began to make experimental films. His studio, known as the Factory, became a meeting point for young artists, actors, musicians and hangers-on. One of these, Valerie Solanas, shot and seriously wounded him in 1968.
Warhol was now established as an internationally famous artist and throughout the 1970s and 1980s exhibited his work around the world.
Over the course of his career, Andy Warhol transformed contemporary art. The power of his work comes from its concentration on fundamental human themes — the glamour of youth and fame, the passing of time and the presence of death.
The son of Ruthenian immigrants, Andy Warhol studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He worked as an advertising designer before becoming, in effect, the Father of Pop Art with his silk-screened pictures of Campbell’s Soup cans and distorted images of Marilyn Monroe.
Employing mass-production techniques to create works, Warhol challenged preconceived notions about the nature of art and erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture. The Andy Warhol Museum’s permanent collection is comprised of more than 12,000 works of art by Warhol including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, film, videotapes, and an extensive archives that consists of ephemera, records, source material for works of art, and other documents of the artist’s life.
On 22 February 1987, Warhol died unexpectedly in a New York hospital following a gall bladder operation.
