New York Icon : Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1928, he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1945 where he majored in pictorial design. After graduation, Warhol moved to New York where he found steady work as a commercial artist. He worked as an illustrator for several magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker and did advertising and window displays for retail stores such as Bonwit Teller and I. Miller. Prophetically, his first assignment was for Glamour magazine for an article titled “Success is a Job in New York.”.

Andy Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist throughout the 1950s, even winning several commendations from the Art Director’s Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In these early years, he went by the name “Warhol.” He had his first individual show as and artist at the Hugo Gallery, exhibiting Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. His work was exhibited in several other venues during the 1950s, including his first group show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1956.

The 60s was an extremely prolific decade for Warhol. Using images from popular culture, Warhol created many paintings that remain icons of 20th-century art, such as his most famous works the Campbell’s Soup Cans, Disasters and Marilyns. In addition to painting, Warhol produced several 16mm films that become underground classics such as Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job. Warhol had by now become almost as famous for his social life as he was as an artist. His social circles included wildly diverse groups from bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats , all intermixed with in a variety of social scenes from black tie events to night clubs with his artistic head quarters the “Factory” being the center of it all.

Warhol suffered a near fatal attack In 1968 when Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) walked into Warhol’s studio, known as the Factory, and shot him.

Warhol began publishing Interview magazine in the early 1970s and renewed his focus on painting. Works created in this decade include Maos, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Torsos and Shadows and many commissioned portraits. Warhol also published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again). Now firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world.

The artist began the 1980s with the publication of POPism: The Warhol ’60s and with exhibitions of Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century and the Retrospectives and Reversal series. He also created two cable television shows, “Andy Warhol’s TV” in 1982 and “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes” for MTV in 1986. His paintings from the 1980s include The Last Suppers, Rorschachs and, in a return to his first great theme of Pop, a series called Ads. Warhol also engaged in a series of collaborations with younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring.

Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987 following routine gall bladder surgery. Buried near his home town in Pittsburgh, his friends and associates organized a memorial mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York that was attended by more than 2,000 people

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