WARHOL, Andy

(b. 6 August 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; d. 22 February 1987 in New York City), artist, film-maker, and entrepreneur whose pop art works of the 1960s, featuring such icons as Campbell's soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley, made him one of the world's most influential and popular artists.

Born Andrew Warhola, Warhol was the youngest of three boys born to Ondrej Warhola, a laborer for the Eichleay Corporation, and Julia (Zavacky) Warhola, a homemaker and folk artist. Warhol attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, graduating in 1945, and then undertook a lengthy apprenticeship in commercial art. After graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1948 with a B.F.A. in pictoral design, Warhol moved with fellow artist Philip Pearlstein to New York City. There, Warhol dropped the last letter of his family name and poured himself into his art. His spare, evocative sketches quickly captured attention and helped him become one of the top commercial artists in the city. By 1955 he was earning over $100,000 annually, though his mother, who had moved in with him in his apartment on Lexington Avenue, pointed out that he was spending $125,000 each year.

Warhol loved the clandestine but culturally rich gay life of New York City and began to collect important works of art, which he piled in his home alongside mounds of American kitsch art. He had larger ambitions and gradually created an individual style of artistic expression. His first efforts stemmed from his commercial work and included sketchbooks of gold leaf shoes, cats, and flowers. His work was featured in galleries, and he published limited edition books containing reprints of his sketches. Still, he lacked recognition. The New York Times labeled his Wild Raspberries show, which opened on 1 December 1959, as "clever frivolity in excelsis." Even though the pop artists Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein were lampooning abstract expressionism, this art form still dominated the scene. As a result critics viewed Warhol's commercial work with horror. Nevertheless, Warhol had by the close of the 1950s sustained a large cadre of contacts, even if many in the New York art world despised him.

As the 1960s dawned Warhol needed a gallery and a distinctive style. He began drawing such childhood cartoon heroes as Dick Tracy, Popeye, and Nancy, and a series of "crummy, cheap ads," though Lichtenstein had already appropriated cartoon imagery in his brutal satires of the artist Jackson Pollock. Warhol began inviting Ivan Karp, an assistant in the Leo Castelli gallery, to view his newer work. Warhol was reinventing his persona as a combination of Marilyn Monroe's vulnerability and Marlon Brando's monosyllabic, punk style. Karp liked one of Warhol's paintings, which presented elaborate, smeared lines of Coca-Cola bottles. Warhol also played inane pop songs for Karp about a hundred times a day until he "understood what it meant." Warhol's sublime, satirical humor helped create this new persona of the artist as pop symbol, a persona he expanded enormously over the next decade. Karp convinced Castelli to sign Warhol to his illustrious stable of pop artists.

Warhol's major notoriety came with his meticulous recreation of a series of Campbell's soup cans. His mother had served him the instant soup daily for lunch during the Great Depression. Campbell's Soup Cans did especially well in Los Angeles, where the pop movement was becoming sovereign.

Warhol began to attract a cadre of artists, assistants, lovers, and sycophants to his home, which served as a salon. There, he discovered the method of silk screening, which, as the author Victor Bockris explains, is a "stencil process in which a photographic image transferred to a porous screen can be quickly duplicated on canvas by laying the screen on the canvas and applying paint or ink over it with a rubber squeegee." Warhol immediately realized the commercial and artistic possibilities of this method. Coincidentally, the actor Marilyn Monroe committed suicide on 4 August 1962, and Warhol decided to paint a series of images of her as an homage. Borrowing a lush still of her from the movie Niagara (1953), he used the outline to frame harsh, almost neon colors. Using the silk-screen method, he reproduced this painting with color variations dozens of times, and then applied the method to another pop icon, Elvis Presley. He then reproduced the Mona Lisa and boxes of Brillo brand soap, and made a controversial mural for the 1964 World's Fair. The mural, which covered a huge wall, featured mug shots of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's thirteen most-wanted men. Angrily, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the fair's sponsors ordered it to be painted over. Ironically, the next day the New York Times ran an article about the spate of robbing at the fair.

Warhol's image appropriations made him the most notorious pop artist of the decade. Shrewdly, he associated himself with global icons and with controversy. In an era when American cultural dominance was controversial, his inscrutable gloss on media fame won adherents in Europe and across America. As his notoriety grew, the monetary values of his paintings soared, and Warhol became a blue-chip artistic commodity, a reputation he enjoyed.

Ever expanding his artistic vision, Warhol moved into filmmaking, which was a natural outgrowth of his fascination with Hollywood and fame, and a good way to use the squads of characters who now fawned on him. Warhol eschewed commercial production techniques by using a hand-held camera to create his "movies." Immediately, he created controversy with his films, which included a six-hour film of a man sleeping, a lengthy film of the Empire State Building from dawn to dusk, and a film of couples engaged in various forms of sex. In 1966 he identified a number of wayward society debutantes as superstars in Chelsea Girls, which won him a wider audience and praise for innovation. Warhol also began recording hundreds of hours of conversation with various people, all of whom he labeled superstars, though no Hollywood producer would ever touch them. He also hired a large Ukrainian hall to showcase Lou Reed's rock band, The Velvet Underground. Warhol, who produced records for the band, designed the cover of their first album with a peel-off image of a banana on the front.

Warhol's studio on Union Square West was named the Factory. Its walls were covered with aluminum foil, giving it a look of cheap pretension. As the painter's fame grew, the Factory became a must-visit spot for any hip tourist in New York City. Each night, Warhol's entourage moved across the square to Max's Kansas City, a phenomenally popular restaurant and bar, where Warhol held court to a shifting array of rock stars, petty nobility, and Hollywood starlets, along with his coterie of drag queens, boyfriends, and druggies. Warhol's openness and his exploitation of misfits backfired tragically on 3 June 1968. Valerie Solanas, an aspiring East Village playwright, and founder and sole member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men), had become angry with Warhol for losing a pornographic manuscript she had submitted to him. At the Factory, Solanas shot Warhol several times, hitting him in the chest and stomach, nearly killing him. Warhol was in the hospital for seven weeks, and he suffered from the wounds the rest of his life. Solanas, who declared herself mentally incompetent to stand trial, was sent to an insane asylum. The feminist spokeswoman Ti-Grace Atkinson declared that Solanas would surely go down in history as a hero for the women's movement. A local radical group denounced Warhol as a "plastic fascist" and applauded Solanas.

Warhol returned to work slowly. His near-death experience only amplified his fame. He produced a major movie called Trash (1970), which featured sodomy and drug injection yet played at movie houses all over the country. His first retrospective was held at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, where he wallpapered the gallery with purple and yellow cow's heads; a similar show opened in Germany, and Rainer Crone published the first serious monograph on Warhol. Always the entrepreneur, he started a magazine, Inter/View (later Interview), which was still prosperous at the beginning of twenty-first century.

After 1970 Warhol's fame grew exponentially. He created a major work in 1972 by appropriating and silk screening a political image of the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung. He started a lucrative portrait business, charging $25,000 to $50,000 per work. During the late 1970s he became a social star of the disco era, presiding over the dance club Studio 54 and appearing at virtually every social event of note. Warhol attempted to cultivate the shah of Iran before that dictator was deposed in 1978. Warhol also created thousands of party-scene images, which he published in a series of illustrated books in the 1970s and 1980s. He also published barely edited transcripts of his taped conversations.

Warhol's originality was never as great as it was in the mid-1960s, though anything he produced was immediately purchased. His wealth and reputation were still growing when he died of cardiac arrest after a gall bladder operation in 1987. Today, with retrospectives, a constant stream of monographs written on him, and his influence apparent everywhere, Warhol's enormous reputation is secure. Warhol is buried in the Warhola family plot in Saint John the Baptist Catholic Cemetery, Byzantine Rite, in Bethel Park, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

Comments from Warhol on his life and work in the 1960s can be found in Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol 1960s (1988). For a good biography on Warhol, see Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (1997). Information about Warhol's creative work can be found in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol's Art and Films (1986). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 23 Feb. 1987).

Graham Russell Hodges