Biography of Andrew Warhol Essay -- Papers

Biography of Andrew Warhol Born Andrew Warhol on August 6, 1928 (some sources say 1927), in Forest City, Pennsylvania, the son of a construction worker and miner from Czechoslovakia. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1945-1949, receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree in pictorial design. Warhol liked to shroud himself in mystery. "I never give my background, and anyway, I make it all up differently every time I'm asked," he said. His exact birth date and place only add to this mystery. Warhol provided no information on the matter, so any definitive statement is subject to question. In 1949 Warhol arrived in New York City, where he made a meager living in advertising display work. He took some of his drawings to Glamour magazine and received a commission to make drawings of shoes. These were published and admired; he then worked for a shoe chain. In 1957 a shoe advertisement brought him the Art Directors' Club Medal. His work appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines, and in 1959 he exhibited his gold shoe drawings in a New York City gallery. In 1960 Warhol began painting pictures with no commercial market in mind. He did a series on comic strips such as Dick Tracy, Popeye, Superman and the Little King. His paintings of Coca Cola bottles and Campbell soup cans, arranged in seemingly endless rows, were ridiculed when they were first shown. He created paintings of money and ... ...ed subjects with great popular imagery and treated the symbol and image as much as he does the real object itself. As a social commentator (a role he denied), Warhol had the uncanny ability to mirror the trends and fads of his time. Recognizing the elements of an urban mass society heavily influenced by symbols, images, and the mass media, he made those symbols and images the subjects of his art. For Warhol and other Pop artists, these images have taken on a reality of their own. They were not only shaped by but also reshaped popular culture. Warhol left social and cultural historians visual documents of the significant elements from America's consumerist society of the postwar era--an important legacy. Warhol died of heart failure hours after under going gall bladder surgery on February 22, 1987, in New York City.