ANDY WARHOL

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. Like his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, Warhol wryly responded to the mass media of the 1960s. His silkscreen-printed paintings of cultural and consumer icons, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Campbell's Soup cans and Brillo boxes, would make him one of the most famous artists of his generation. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, he graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, before moving to New York to pursue a career in commercial illustration. Warhol's illustrations for editorials like Vogue and Glamour during the 1950s led him to financial success. Warhol was a gay man, keeping much of his life private life a secret, although he sometimes referenced his sexuality through art. This is perhaps most evident in his drawings of male nudes from the 1950s, and later in his film Sleep (1963), which portrays the poet John Giorno sleeping nude. In 1964, Warhol rented a studio loft on East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan, which was later known as the Factory. Quick to realize the cult of celebrity, the Factory acted as a hub for fashionable movie stars, models, and artists who became fodder for his prints and films, as well as a performance venue for The Velvet Underground. The prolific artist worked across painting, sculpture, and new media throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Always looking for current subject matter, during the 1980s he collaborated with several younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. Warhol died tragically at age 58 in New York, NY, following complications from routine gall bladder surgery. After his death, the artist's estate became The Andy Warhol Foundation and in 1994, a museum dedicated to the artist and his oeuvre opened in his native Pittsburgh. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.