WARHOL, ANDY

* 06.08.1928 Pittsburgh, † 22.02.1987 New York

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh on 6 August 1928, the third child of a Russian immigrant family. At the age of eight, he fell ill with St Vitus's dance and a rare pigment disorder, which often led to him being mistaken for an albino. Confined to bed, he discovered a passion for comics and movies. From 1945 to 1949, Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in painting and design. The young Warhol was drawn to the hotspot for art and literature - New York. There he worked as a window dresser and soon became the most sought-after advertising designer in the city. His first drawings were published in 1950 in the magazine ‘Mademoiselle’. With the designer Suzie Frankfurt, he developed the ‘drop-and-dripping technique’, in which he took motifs painted in India ink and ink, copied them using blotting paper and transferred them to another sheet – a preliminary stage to his later preferred technique, silkscreen printing. This is how he created numerous greeting cards, giveaways, contributions for magazines but also cookbooks. At so-called ‘colouring parties’ he had friends and guests colour in these works — here, too, a hint of his later serial production and the Factory.

At the end of the 1950s, he decided to turn his back on graphic design and work as an artist. Like no other artist before him, he confronted the way society had changed. He looked for everyday objects, events, stars, and starlets that were part of everyone's life and had some kind of significance for everyone. For example, mass-produced items, such as the famous Campbell's Soup cans, which in the 1950s/60s were found in every pantry in the USA and England, or celebrities such as James Dean, Jacky Kennedy, and Marylin Monroe, whose fate was shared by an entire generation. Warhol made expert use of comics, newspaper photos and images of stars, starlets, accidents, but also of events or objects, elevating them to icons, not only of his time but also of ours, by using them both in his artworks and their simultaneous serial production. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was to discover silkscreen printing, the technique which enabled him to achieve the seriality that is intrinsic to his work. The Factory, founded in 1962, also contributed to taking seriality to the extreme.

In 1968, an attempt was made on Warhol's life by the radical women's rights activist Valerie Solanas. As a result, he withdrew more and more, and the formerly experimental Factory increasingly devoted itself to the commercialisation of his art. As a result of this experience and the later death of his mother, the theme of death entered Warhol's work. In addition, portraits, including commissioned portraits, became increasingly important. Andy Warhol died on 22 February 1987.

The Andy Warhol Foundation of Visual Arts was set up before his death, and, along with his family, received a large part of his fortune, which was estimated at over 100 million US dollars. Today, the Foundation is compiling a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of his works.