Warhol, who clearly relished his celebrity, became a fixture at infamous New York City nightclubs like Studio 54 and Max's Kansas City. (Warhol was a friend of Reed's and managed Reed's band, the Velvet Underground.) In 1964, Warhol opened his own art studio, a large silver-painted warehouse known simply as "The Factory." The Factory quickly became one of New York City's premier cultural hotspots, a scene of lavish parties attended by the city's wealthiest socialites and celebrities, including musician Lou Reed, who paid tribute to the hustlers and transvestites he'd met at The Factory with his hit song "Walk on the Wild Side"-the verses of which contain descriptions of individuals who were fixtures at the legendary studio/warehouse in the '60s, including Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, "Little Joe" Dallesandro, "Sugar Plum Fairy" Joe Campbell and Jackie Curtis. His portrait "Eight Elvises" eventually resold for $100 million in 2008, making it one of the most valuable paintings in world history. As these portraits gained fame and notoriety, Warhol began to receive hundreds of commissions for portraits from socialites and celebrities. He also painted celebrity portraits in vivid and garish colors his most famous subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Mao Tse-tung. Warhol's other famous pop paintings depicted Coca-cola bottles, vacuum cleaners and hamburgers. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again." These small canvas works of everyday consumer products created a major stir in the art world, bringing both Warhol and pop art into the national spotlight for the first time.īritish artist Richard Hamilton described pop art as "popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business." As Warhol himself put it, "Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. In 1962, he exhibited the now-iconic paintings of Campbell's soup cans. In the late 1950s, Warhol began devoting more attention to painting, and in 1961, he debuted the concept of "pop art"-paintings that focused on mass-produced commercial goods. He won frequent awards for his uniquely whimsical style, using his own blotted line technique and rubber stamps to create his drawings. He landed a job with Glamour magazine in September, and went on to become one of the most successful commercial artists of the 1950s. It was also at this time that he dropped the "a" at the end of his last name to become Andy Warhol. When he graduated from college with his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1949, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. That same year, Warhol began at Schenley High School, and upon graduating, in 1945, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute for Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to study pictorial design. Warhol's father had recognized his son's artistic talents, and in his will he dictated that his life savings go toward Warhol's college education. Warhol was so upset that he could not attend his father's funeral, and he hid under his bed throughout the wake. In 1942, at the age of 14, Warhol again suffered a tragedy when his father passed away from a jaundiced liver. Warhol attended Holmes Elementary school and took the free art classes offered at the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art) in Pittsburgh. He was also an avid fan of movies, and when his mother bought him a camera at the age of nine, he took up photography as well, developing film in a makeshift darkroom he set up in their basement. Drawing soon became Warhol's favorite childhood pastime. It was during these months, while Warhol was sick in bed, that his mother, herself a skillful artist, gave him his first drawing lessons. Vitus's Dance - a rare and sometimes fatal disease of the nervous system that left him bedridden for several months. They were devout Byzantine Catholics who attended mass regularly and maintained much of their Slovakian culture and heritage while living in one of Pittsburgh's Eastern European ethnic enclaves.Īt the age of eight, Warhol contracted Chorea-also known as St. His father, Andrej Warhola, was a construction worker, while his mother, Julia Warhola, was an embroiderer. Early Lifeīorn Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in the neighborhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Warhol's parents were Slovakian immigrants. Warhol died on February 22, 1987, in New York City. He ventured into a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, filmmaking, video installations and writing and controversially blurred the lines between fine art and mainstream aesthetics. Andy Warhol was a successful magazine and ad illustrator who became a leading artist of the 1960s Pop art movements.
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