| Andy Warhol | ||
| Birth Date: August 6, 1928 |
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| Death Date: February 22, 1987 Artist Gallery |
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| Andy Warhol, born in 1928, was the son of Andrei and Julia Warhola, immigrants from Mikova, deep in the Carpathian Mountains, near what is today Czechoslovakia.
Warhol attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He began his career as a fashion illustrator, specializing first in shoes, then in other images; his work always seemed to have a provocative bent. The images were slick, quick and easy to read. They didn’t require much thought, and they could be produced in mass quantities, consumed and thrown over for new images.
Warhol is most often associated with his images of Coke bottles, Brillo pad cartons and contemporary American celebrities. He created endless rows of these images through a silk-screening technique, and later massed produced them in lithographs.
Warhol viewed the world as a mechanical, repetitive place where fame comes from recognition and the ability to inspire the sensational. As a Pop artist, he used his work as a sort of social commentary to express his view of life. Warhol said many times that the only real statement an artist can make is repetition to the point of boredom, since this is the way the public perceives images, remembers them, and becomes inured to them.
Like the disposable society he represented, Warhol’s works, at first glance, do not require much thought. As if to emphasize the ambivalence between emotional and visual responses to his work, Warhol said that “his image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and harsh materialistic objects on which America is built. It a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us”.
Warhol is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. His work and ideas both reflect and helped shape American mass media and popular culture.
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