Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was an American artist and filmmaker. He was an initiator and leading exponent of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. 

Warhol graduated in 1949 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh with a degree in pictorial design. He moved to New York City and worked as a commercial illustrator for about a decade. Warhol began painting in the late 1950s and received notoriety in 1962 when he exhibited paintings of Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes.

By 1963 he was mass-producing purposely banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic silkscreen prints. He began printing endless variations of celebrity portraits in garish colors. The silkscreen technique was ideally suited to Warhol; the repeated image was reduced to an insipid and dehumanized cultural icon that reflected both the supposed emptiness of American material culture and the artist's emotional noninvolvement with the practice of his art. Warhol's work placed him in the forefront of the emerging Pop art movement in America.

In 1968 Warhol was shot and nearly killed by Valerie Solanas. Warhol had by this time become a well-known fixture on the fashion and avant-garde art scene and was an influential celebrity in his own right. Throughout the 1970s and until his death he continued to produce prints depicting political leaders and celebrities.

Warhol’s work is featured in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. In his will the artist dictated that his entire estate be used to create a foundation for "the advancement of the visual arts." The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established in 1987.