Andy Warhol Lifestory
Andrew Warhola was born into a working class family in Forest City, Pennsylvania on August 6, 1928. At a young age Andrew and his family moved to Pittsburgh, which would be the city he graduated high school from in 1945. Stricken at an early age with a rare neurological disorder, the young Andy Warhol found solace and escape in the form of popular celebrity magazines and DC comic books, imagery he would return to years later. (http://www.warholfoundation.org/legacy/biography.html) After graduation Andy Warhola attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), graduating in June 1949 with a degree in Pictorial Design and dropping the “a“ from his last name. On February 22, 1987 Andy Warhol, a millionaire at the age of 58, died due to complications of a routine gallbladder surgery in New York City. (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0912238/bio) When Warhol moved to New York, work came quickly for him. Within a year of arriving, he garnered top assignments as a commercial artist for a variety of clients including Columbia Records, Glamour magazine, Harper Bazaar, NBC, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, and others. He also designed window displays for Bonwit Teller and I. Miller department stores. (http://www.warholfoundation.org/legacy/biography.html) As Warhol’s fame grew as a graphic artist he turned his passion into painting and drawing during the fifties. It was not until the late sixties and early seventies that Warhol produced some of his most ironic works. He started painting readily found, mass-produced objects, drawing on his extensive advertising background. First, his paintings was based on comic strips in the likes of Superman, Popeye, and two of Coke-Cola bottles. Then his ever-so famous series of Campbell’s Soup cans came along, along with his famous celebrity portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and others. When asked about the impulse to paint Campbell’s Soup cans, Warhol replied, “ I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something