Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three sons of Ondrej and Julia Warhola, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from the village of Mikova in what is now Slovakia ^[1]. His father worked in construction and coal mining, and the family belonged to a Byzantine Catholic parish, where the young Andy absorbed the gilded icons that some critics later connected to his silkscreened celebrity portraits ^[2].

Childhood was not easy. In third grade Warhol contracted Sydenham's chorea, a nervous system disorder sometimes called St. Vitus's dance, which kept him bedridden for long stretches ^[1]. During those months his mother supplied him with comic books, movie magazines, and drawing materials, and he began collecting autographed photographs of Hollywood stars. The illness left him with blotchy skin and a lifelong self-consciousness about his appearance, but it also planted an obsession with fame and imagery that never left him.

His father died in 1942, having set aside savings for his youngest son's education. Warhol enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, where he studied pictorial design and graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree ^[3]. That summer he moved to New York City, dropped the final letter from his surname, and set out to find work as a commercial artist.

New York in the 1950s rewarded Warhol quickly. His whimsical blotted-line drawings of shoes for the retailer I. Miller, published in the New York Times, made him one of the most sought-after illustrators in the city, and he won multiple awards from the Art Directors Club ^[3]. He drew for Glamour, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar, designed album covers, and earned enough to buy a townhouse where he lived with his mother, Julia, who had joined him from Pittsburgh and often lettered his commercial work in her distinctive script ^[1].

Commercial success, however, was not the recognition he wanted. By 1960 Warhol was painting canvases based on comic strips and advertisements, searching for a subject that could carry him into the fine art world. The answer arrived in 1962: thirty-two canvases, each depicting a different variety of Campbell's Soup, shown at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in his first solo painting exhibition ^[4]. The paintings baffled and irritated many viewers, which was precisely the point. Mass-produced groceries, rendered with deadpan uniformity, forced the question of what counted as art at all.

That same year Warhol adopted the photographic silkscreen, a technique that let him reproduce an image over and over with mechanical detachment. When Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, he began screening her publicity photograph in grids and lurid colors, and the Marilyn series, along with images of Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, dollar bills, and Coca-Cola bottles, made him the most talked-about figure in the new movement critics were calling Pop art ^[2].

Any account of Andy Warhol achievements has to begin with the way he collapsed the wall between high art and consumer culture. Works such as Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), the Marilyn Diptych (1962), and the Brillo Box sculptures (1964) argued, without a word of manifesto, that the imagery of supermarkets and tabloids belonged in museums ^[4]. The Marilyn Diptych now hangs in Tate's collection, and Campbell's Soup Cans belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York ^[5].

In 1964 he moved his operation into a silver-painted loft on East 47th Street that became known as the Factory. There, assistants helped him produce silkscreens in quantity while an ever-changing crowd of artists, musicians, socialites, and drag performers turned the studio into a permanent event ^[2]. Warhol managed and produced the Velvet Underground, designing the peelable banana cover for their 1967 debut album, and he founded Interview magazine in 1969, a publication devoted to celebrity conversation that outlived him by decades ^[6].

Film occupied much of his energy in the 1960s. He made hundreds of works, from static duration pieces such as Sleep (1964), which shows a man sleeping for over five hours, and Empire (1964), an eight-hour view of the Empire State Building, to the commercially successful Chelsea Girls (1966), a split-screen portrait of the personalities orbiting the Factory ^[7]. He also shot nearly five hundred short filmed portraits he called Screen Tests. His silent films challenged every assumption about what cinema was for, and film archives and museums continue to restore and screen them.

The market eventually ratified his importance in blunt numerical terms. His 1963 silkscreen Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold at auction in 2013 for more than 105 million dollars, and Shot Sage Blue Marilyn brought 195 million dollars at Christie's in 2022, at the time the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist ^[8].

Warhol cultivated a public persona of blank detachment, answering interview questions in monosyllables and insisting there was nothing behind the surface. The private man was more complicated. He was openly gay at a time when that carried real professional risk, and his identity shaped both his early erotic line drawings of the 1950s and the queer social world of the Factory ^[2]. He had significant long-term relationships, including with the interior designer Jed Johnson, who lived with him for over a decade ^[1].

He remained a practicing Byzantine Catholic throughout his life, attending Mass regularly and volunteering at a church-run soup kitchen in his later years, facts that surprised many who knew only the silver-wigged fixture of Manhattan nightlife ^[2]. His mother lived with him in New York until 1971 and died the following year; he did not attend her funeral, a decision biographers have connected to his lifelong dread of illness and death.

That dread had a concrete source. On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in one of his films, shot Warhol at the Factory. The wounds were nearly fatal: surgeons opened his chest and massaged his heart, and he wore a surgical corset for the rest of his life ^[1]. The shooting ended the open-door era of the Factory and deepened his fear of hospitals, which would matter grimly two decades later.

The 1970s brought a more corporate Warhol. He rebuilt his practice around commissioned silkscreen portraits of collectors, entertainers, and heads of state, charging substantial fees and producing hundreds of canvases, including images of Mao Zedong that played on the mass reproduction of political icons ^[4]. Critics who had championed the audacity of the 1960s often dismissed this period as society portraiture, yet the work kept his enterprise, which he cheerfully called Business Art, running at full speed ^[2].

He published widely during these years, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) in 1975, a book of aphorisms and observations on fame, money, and love ^[6]. In the 1980s he collaborated with younger painters, most notably Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom he produced a large series of joint canvases, and he embraced new outlets from MTV, where he hosted Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, to early computer art on the Commodore Amiga ^[8].

In February 1987 Warhol entered New York Hospital for gallbladder surgery he had postponed out of fear. The operation appeared routine, but he died in his sleep of cardiac arrhythmia in the early morning of February 22, 1987, at age 58 ^[1]. His estate, valued in the hundreds of millions, funded the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, established that year to support artists and preserve his legacy ^[9].

Few artists have proved harder to escape. Warhol's insight that images gain power through repetition anticipated the visual logic of advertising, branding, and eventually social media, and the phrase attributed to him about fifteen minutes of fame entered everyday speech as a description of disposable celebrity ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Andy Warhol soon discovers that the question extends past painting into film, publishing, music, television, and the economics of the art world itself.

His institutional afterlife is unusually large. The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh in 1994 as one of the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world, holding thousands of his paintings, drawings, photographs, and films along with his archives, including the 610 sealed Time Capsules of ephemera he boxed up over the decades ^[10]. The Andy Warhol Foundation continues to make grants to contemporary artists, and major retrospectives, including the Whitney Museum's 2018 survey Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, keep drawing enormous audiences ^[9].

The basic Andy Warhol facts, a sickly child of immigrant Pittsburgh who became the century's shrewdest observer of fame, still carry an element of improbability. That improbability is part of the point of any Andy Warhol biography: he demonstrated that identity could be constructed, multiplied, and sold, and artists working today in every medium still operate inside the questions he raised.