"Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is the defining figure of Pop Art and the most culturally prescient artist of the second half of the twentieth century. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, he grew up in working-class circumstances that gave him both a fascination with aspiration and an outsider's clarity about the mechanisms of American consumer culture. A childhood illness left him bedridden for extended periods, during which his mother furnished him with comic books, movie magazines, and art supplies - the raw material of a sensibility that would go on to reshape the art world.
He graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 and moved immediately to New York, where he became one of the most successful commercial illustrators of the 1950s, working for Vogue, Glamour, Tiffany & Co., and I. Miller shoes. This decade in commercial art was not a prelude to his real career but its foundation - it gave him an understanding of image, repetition, and mass reproduction that would inform everything that followed.
In 1962, Warhol exhibited his paintings of Campbell's Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, announced himself as a fine artist of radical intent, and helped launch the Pop Art movement that would define the decade. Where Abstract Expressionism had retreated into the private interior life of the artist, Warhol turned outward - to supermarkets, tabloids, celebrity, and death - and treated the images of mass culture with the same formal attention previously reserved for mythology and history painting. The silkscreen process, which he adopted and perfected, was ideally suited to his purposes: it was mechanical, repeatable, and deliberately impersonal, stripping the artist's hand from the work and raising questions about authenticity, originality, and value that reverberate still.
His studio, The Factory - first on East 47th Street, later on Union Square - became the most famous artistic environment of the 1960s: a space where art was produced at industrial scale, where celebrity and counterculture intersected, and where Warhol presided as impresario, observer, and brand. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Mao Zedong, and Elizabeth Taylor transformed their subjects into icons of the same order as religious imagery - at once elevated and drained of human particularity. His Death and Disaster series confronted American culture with its own appetite for spectacle. His films - Sleep, Empire, Chelsea Girls - pushed the boundaries of avant-garde cinema with a radicalism that remains unmatched.
Warhol survived an assassination attempt in 1968 and continued to work prolifically until his death in February 1987, following routine gall bladder surgery. He was fifty-eight. His graphic output alone - screenprints, portfolios, and multiples produced across three decades - constitutes one of the most significant bodies of work on paper in the history of twentieth-century art, and remains among the most actively collected.
His works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Tate Modern, London; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and institutions worldwide.