Warhol, Andy

Warhol, Andy (c. 1928-1987), American painter and film-maker, who was a leader of the Pop Art movement. He was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and educated at Carnegie Institute of Technology. He began his career as a commercial artist in New York. In the 1960s he attracted attention with exhibitions of prints of startlingly ordinary images, such as Campbell's Soup Can (1965, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York) and Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), or of iconically famous figures like Marilyn Monroe (1962, Mr and Mrs Burton Tremaine Collection). The significance of these images lay in the fact that they were of everyday, mass-produced objects or of celebrities, and that, being prints, they too could be endlessly repeated by a mechanical process.

Warhol took a similar impersonal approach in his experimental underground films, such as The Chelsea Girls (1966), a seven-hour, virtually unedited semi-documentary. Later, more complex films, such as Lonesome Cowboys (1969) and Trash (1970), are also marked by improvised dialogue, lack of plot, and extreme eroticism.

Among Warhol's publications are The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975) and America (1985), a collection of his scathing photographs of contemporary life in the United States. From 1969 until his death, he published Interview, a monthly magazine with illustrated articles about current celebrities. In 1994 the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest museum in the United States devoted to a single artist, opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2002 a major retrospective exhibition of his works, originally curated by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, was held at the Tate Modern, London.