| Andy Warhol (1928-1987) | ||
| Andy Warhol Museum | Andy Warhol grew up in a
Czechoslovakian neighborhood in a small Pennsylvania town. His father died when he was 12.
Nervous and sickly, Warhol spent a lot of time in bed looking through movie magazines for
pictures of favorite stars. His mother fed him Campbell’s soup
every day for lunch. As a teenager in the 1940s he loved the movies. He later produced
images of movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley,
Elizabeth Taylor). However, he wasn't attracted to them as real people but as fantasies
invented by the media (media image).
When Warhol was 19 years old he graduated in fine arts from Carnegie Institute of Technology (Pittsburgh) and planned to teach art. But a friend convinced him to moving to NY where he decided to try commercial art. Painfully shy with no money, he carried his portfolio in a brown paper bag. Within a few years he was at the top of his field. But he wanted real fame. So in 1960 did his first Pop paintings. Warhol liked to copy even himself. For a West Coast lecture he sent someone else dressed in a silver wig, a leather jacket and a white dazed-looking face. At press conferences assistants answered questions directed to him while he sat behind them. "I want to be a machine," he proclaimed. (Warhol called his studio the Factory.) The artist searched magazines for the right photo of a person and then sent it to a print shop to have a photoscreen made. A 1962 exhibit in Los Angeles included small paintings of Campbell’s soup cans. A rival gallery down the street put a stack of soup cans on display with a sign, "Get the real thing for 29 cents." Warhol was almost shot to death in 1968 by a disturbed admirer.
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