Andy Warhol American , 1928-1987

Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, USA 1928 – New York, USA 1987)

Andrew Warhola was born in Pennsylvania, the son of immigrants from Ruthenia, now a region of Slovakia. In 1949, he moved to New York, changed his name to Warhol and started work as a graphic designer for various magazines and as a window dresser.

In the early 1960s, he began experimenting with emblematic images of American popular culture taken from advertisements, newspaper headlines and mass-produced images including the famous Campbell soup cans and Coca Cola bottles. He produced celebrity portraits in vivid colours; his most famous subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Mao Tse-Tung. His impersonal artistic style aimed to make "objective" art, recording reality.

That same year, he took part in the New Realists exhibition in New York, the first important focus on the phenomenon of pop art.

As Lucy Lippard points out, this unique dimension of American pop art, led by Warhol, lies in both having introduced low art subjects in to a high art context – images from comics, advertising and mass media – and having altered the style and linguistic techniques of art.

Thus, Warhol draws on the icons of nascent mass culture, such as common everyday objects, manually reproducing them with a flat and monotonous technique, minimising personalisation in the search for a technique that is detached and mechanical. There are no expressive or emotional implications: Warhol radically confers an iconic dignity to ordinary, mass-consumed objects.

In 1963, Warhol began to make experimental films. His studio, The Factory, became a meeting point for young artists, actors, musicians and anyone interested in experimentation.

In 1968, one of the people orbiting around Factory, Valerie Solanas, shot and seriously wounded him.

Warhol was established as an international celebrity with numerous exhibitions dedicated to him in the 1970s and 1980s around the world.

In 1987, Warhol died unexpectedly in a New York hospital, following a gallbladder operation.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Group (Sebastiano Pellion di Persano)