Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (1928–1987, born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was an artist, filmmaker, and cultural provocateur whose work defined the visual language of Pop Art and whose influence on art, fashion, media, and celebrity culture remains undiminished. Born Andrew Warhola to Rusyn immigrant parents, he established himself as one of New York’s most sought-after commercial illustrators during the 1950s before transitioning to fine art at the turn of the 1960s, when his silkscreen paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and Brillo boxes announced a new and unsettling relationship between fine art and mass consumer culture.
Through his Factory studio on Union Square, Warhol gathered around him an extraordinary community of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and personalities, producing paintings, sculpture, film, photography, and the influential Interview magazine with a productivity that deliberately challenged the romantic myth of the solitary artist. His silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Mao Zedong, and countless others transformed the photograph into an icon and the icon into a commodity, while his underground films and multimedia events expanded the possibilities of what art could be and where it could happen.
His work is held in virtually every major museum collection in the world, with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh maintaining the most comprehensive archive of his output. He died in New York in 1987 following complications from gallbladder surgery.