Warhol, Andy (1928–1987)

US artist and film-maker. Known as the ‘Pope of Pop’, Warhol was a leader of the pop art movement. He achieved renown in 1962 when he exhibited works based on popular objects, images, and celebrities, for example his Campbell's soup cans, Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City), and The Twenty Marilyns (1962; Private Collection, Paris). In his New York studio, the Factory, he and his assistants reproduced the images in series of garishly-coloured silk-screen prints on canvas. Inspired by popular culture and mass media, Warhol changed the face of 20th-century art. His films include Chelsea Girls (1966) and Trash (1970).

Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, and studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In the 1950s he became a commercial artist in New York; however, it was in the 1960s, with the breakthrough of pop art, that his eccentric personality and flair for self-publicity made him a household name. Warhol chose silk-screen as a medium because it was impersonal (he believed that anyone should be able to produce his art in his place); its nature was also in keeping with Warhol's commentary on mass production and US consumerism. Apart from popular culture, Warhol also depicted ‘the American way of life’, including, in 1963, disturbing images such as car crashes, accidents, suicide, and the electric chair. He was a pioneer of multimedia events with the ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ touring show in 1966 featuring the Velvet Underground rock group. In 1968 he was shot and nearly killed by a radical feminist, Valerie Solanas.

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s Warhol dedicated much of his time to film-making. His films, beginning with Sleep (1963) and ending with Bad (1977), have a strong improvisational and often documentary element; like his prints, they are somewhat impersonal and detached. In Chelsea Girls, for example, the actors improvised for approximately seven hours in front of an immobile camera.

For the remainder of the 1970s and 1980s Warhol was primarily a society portraitist, but he also created a series on Mao Zedong, published the society and arts magazine Interview, and produced a cable TV show. His books include The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975) and Popism (1980).

In 1994 a museum of his works was opened in Pittsburgh, the largest museum in the country to be dedicated solely to the works of one artist.