Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928–1987)

Andy Warhol is one of the most recognisable artists of the modern era. His parents were Carpatho-Rusyns from an eastern region of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and they emigrated to the United States where Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied pictorial design at Carnegie Technical Institute and rapidly became a successful commercial illustrator after he moved to New York in 1949. Not until the early sixties did he win recognition as an artist. In 1962, his ‘portrait’ paintings of thirty-two Campbell’s soup cans—from clam chowder to vegetarian vegetable—was a watershed. Shortly after that he began to use silk screen prints which were derived from photographic sources and made up for him by a commercial manufacturer. His iconic images of Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao, for instance, quickly became definitive Warholian artworks, even as he dramatically minimised the role of traditional autographic techniques in favour of reproductive ones. Along with Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter, he was pivotal in developing the new post-painterly art which emerged in response to painterly abstract painting of the ninteen-fifties.