It was during a childhood illness that Warhol discovered his love of art. His mother, an artist, taught him to draw when he was bedridden for months. She also gave him a camera (he was an avid movie fan) and he set up a makeshift darkroom in his basement. These gifts altered the course of his life. He went on to graduate from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in pictorial design.
Warhol started his career as a commercial artist and was very successful using his own blotted line technique and rubber stamps in a whimsical way while at Glamour magazine in the 1950's. In the early 60's he started "Pop" Art - where he focused on mass produced commercial goods. He first exhibited the now infamous Campbell soup paintings in 1962.
As Warhol himself put it, "Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again."
He also painted Coca-Cola bottles, hamburgers and even vacuum cleaners. He used vivid, bold colors to paint portraits of some of the most legendary figures of the times - including Marilyn, Jackie and Elvis. His series of the "Eight Elvis's" resold for a record $100 million in 2008, making it one of the most valuable pieces of art in history.
He opened "The Factory" in 1964 which quickly became the hot spot in NYC. It was a vacuous silver-painted warehouse that the "it" socialites and celebrities flocked to. Warhol himself became a celebrity and observed "more than anything people just want to be stars."
In the 1970's he released several books and went on to make over 60 films including Sleep, which depicts poet John Giorno sleeping for 6 hours and Eat, which shows a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.
"Warhol's life and work simultaneously satirized and celebrated materiality and celebrity. On the one hand, his paintings of distorted brand images and celebrity faces could be read as a critique of what he viewed as a culture obsessed with money and celebrity. On the other hand, Warhol's focus on consumer goods and pop-culture icons, as well as his own taste for money and fame, suggest a life in celebration of the very aspects of American culture that his work criticized. Warhol spoke to this apparent contradiction between his life and work in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, writing that 'making money is art, and good business is the best art.'"
Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987.
