Andy Warhol


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Andy Warhol was born Andy Warhola in Forest City, Pennsylvania, sometime between 1928 and 1930 (according to conflicting sources), the son of a miner and construction worker. As as a young man, Andy worked in a department store and studied commercial art at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he met fellow student and artist Philip Pearlstein.

In June of 1949, Andy graduated with a B.A. in fine arts, and along with Pearlstein, moved to New York City's Lower East Side. He found work doing commercial artwork for Harpers' Bazaar and Vogue magazines, as well as doing advertising artwork for the I. Miller shoe company. While he was very successful as a commercial artist (he was awarded many prizes for his commercial work), Andy wanted to be known as a "pure" artist, and began executing canvases that reflected his personality.

In 1960 , Andy executed many of the works that would make him forever associated with the "pop" art movement ( the label came from a painting by British artist Richard Hamilton), along with artists like Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. He made several works of comic strips (which Lichtenstein would also be known for doing), as well as paintings of Coca Cola bottles. In 1962, he made his now legendary painting of a Campbell's Soup can, that like the "readymades" of Marcel Duchamp, used a popular image known by everyone as was declared as art by the artist. Brillo boxes and Del Monte cans followed, consumer images now given a pop culture resonance by Andy, who saw an aesthetic quality in these images.

He also began to execute many silkscreen portraits of move stars - Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor - that reflected Andy's obsession with the many aspects of stardom. Also during this time, from 1962-63, he made a series of pictures of car crashes and electric chairs, and for the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, executed "Thirteen Most Wanted Men " for the New York City Pavilion, which the artist painted over after Nelson Rockefeller asked it be taken down because it showed discrimination against Italian Americans.

In 1963, Andy hired Gerard Malanga as his assistant at his New York attic Factory studio, and turned out work at a prodigious rate (over 2,000 pictures between 1962 and 1964) as well as making his first experimental films, Sleep (6 hours of a 20-minute clip of a man sleeping) and Empire , 8 hours of a static image of the Empire State building. Many of Andy's Factory cronies - Edie Sedgewick, Jane Holzer, Viva , Ultra Violet - became "superstars" in Andy's underground films, and became instant celebrities in New York's art communities. It is this image of Warhol at the factory that is most often associated with him, a sort of glitzy underground demimonde where Andy was indeed king.

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