Andy Warhol

Born to Slovakian immigrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol’s career as the foremost proponent of Pop Art began during his days as a commercial artist for newspapers and magazines. Over the 1950s and ’60s he rose to become the king of the New York avant-garde, and one of the most important and iconic artists of the 20th century. Works such as  Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and his screen prints of Marilyn Monroe have come to define our notions of 20th century art.

Warhol created art out of the imagery and iconography of consumerism and celebrity culture, and applied the same commercial processes of mass production to make it. It was an idea that venerated the banality of popular culture. Warhol sought to demolish rarefication in art and redefine the artist from Romantic visionary to an organising principle in a commercial system of mass production.

Having had his first solo shows of paintings in the early 1950s, Warhol began focusing on screen printing in the 1960s. He opened his studio, The Factory, in 1963. The Factory became the centre for an entourage of transvestites, drug addicts, artists, models and musicians such as The Velvet Underground. The latter’s debut album cover featured Warhol’s now-iconic ‘peel slowly and see’ Banana. By 1965 Warhol was making seminal films such as Blow Job (1964) and  Sleep (1963). The Factory would remain an important centre of New York Bohemianism, but Warhol began distancing himself from its more unconventional fringes following an attempt on his life by the radical feminist and Factory acolyte, Valerie Solanas, in 1968.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Warhol returned to painting with works such as his ‘ Oxidation Paintings ’ series. He mentored and collaborated with a new generation of younger artists, including  Jean-Michel Basquiat  and  Francesco Clemente . He was just 58 when he died unexpectedly following a routine gall bladder operation in 1987.

Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn made auction history at Christie’s New York in 2022. It sold for $195 million, making it the most expensive 20th-century work of art to sell at auction.