Andy Warhol Biography

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1928.

Warhol began as a commercial illustrator in New York, doing artwork for ads and magazines in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1962 Andy Warhol single-handedly invented “Pop Art” at a solo show at New York's Stable Gallery. Among other now universally recognized images—Warhol unveiled his portrait of a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. A nearby gallery displayed actual soup cans with the sign, "Get the real thing for 29 cents." Now, the piece is priceless! The 1962 show brought Warhol overnight fame, and rekindled heated debate in art circles of the question: “What is art?” He turned products into art, and himself into a product, and made our consumer society itself into a celebrity, brazenly predicting that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes!

By the mid-1960s Warhol had become an icon of the psychedelic generation; he made strange and lengthy experimental movies, held famous gatherings in "The Factory," his Manhattan studio,