Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born in a working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) with a bachelor’s degree in design, he moved to New York City. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Warhol created window displays and print ads for high-end department stores and magazines, such as Vogue. As a commercial illustrator, Warhol emphasized the hand-drawn character of his curved and blotted lines. It is a characteristic paradox, however, that when Warhol began to make “fine art” (paintings and sculptures) instead of advertisements, around 1962, he turned to a more mechanical, hence commercial, style and process. Warhol based his well-known Pop art paintings and sculptures on anonymous photographs of ubiquitous commodities, such as Campbell’s Soup cans and dollar bills. At the same time, he invented new, influential forms with the mass media of film, television, and popular music. For example, his signature approach to filmmaking—in which he would simply record people “being themselves” (talking, eating, kissing)—is widely seen as the origin of the now-pervasive genre of reality TV.