Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola Jr.

• Born August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA USA
• Died February 22, 1987 in New York, NY USA

Biographical Information

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" - Attributed to Andy Warhol, but likely of different parentage.

Andy Warhol is one of the most famous American artists of the second half of the 20th Century as the leader of the "Pop Art" movement that took over from abstract expressionism as the leading artistic movement in the country. He is famous for his silkscreen paintings of celebrities, produced from photographs and often in series, and for his depiction of everyday objects elevated to iconic stature, most famously cans of "Campbell's" soup.

Born in Pittsburgh, PA in a working class family from what is now Slovakia, he got his start as a commercial artist, drawing illustrations for magazines and advertising posters, before attempting to start a career as a serious artist. He was always drawn to celebrity culture, and one of his first works to receive attention in 1961 was a series of prints derived from a newspaper picture of Roger Maris, who was then the most famous baseball player in the country as he was chasing down Babe Ruth's seemingly untouchable record of 60 home runs in a season, the picture being reproduced numerous times on the canvas. By then, Warhol had moved to New York, NY to be closer to the center of the art world, and that initial series of pictures soon encouraged him to produce other portraits of celebrities, most famously actress Marilyn Monroe and Chinese leader Mao Zedong. These were done in a style that was different from anything else at the time, reduced to the subject's most prominent features and using unexpected colors that many found outlandish at first.

By the mid-1970s, he was one of the best-known living artists in the world when he was commissoned in 1977 to paint a series called Athletes, depicting the most famous sports figures of the day. Alongside universal icons such as boxer Muhammad Ali, tennis player Chris Evert and soccer star Pelé, Warhol selected one baseball player, who was pitcher Tom Seaver of the New York Mets, arguably the most famous baseball player in New York City at the time (he would soon be eclipsed by Reggie Jackson, and in any case was traded to the Cincinnati Reds soon after Warhol decided to select him as the sport's representative in the series). Warhol did not work from stock pictures, but as an accomplished film-maker and photographer, he had the subjects pose for him for photographs, from which he produced their pictures. In Seaver's case, this took place during the Reds' first visit to New York following the trade. Eight versions of Seaver's picture were produced: one was given to Seaver, who greatly liked it and had it hang in a prominent location in his house; another is now at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, while the others were sold to prominent collectors and to museums. In 1985, he produced a picture of Pete Rose in the form of a baseball card in conjunction with Rose's anticipated breaking of the all-time career hit record later that year.

In addition to his paintings, Warhol dabbled in music (he is credited as the producer of the Velvet Underground's first, self-titled album, although his biggest contribution was designing the album's iconic cover), movies (he was the producer of a particularly gory version of Frankenstein in 1973), and authored a number of books that are principally art objects. He was a compulsive collector of everyday objects and folk art, gathering them into "time capsules", and is known for a number of sayings, the most famous of which is the one quoted at the top of this article. He also helped to discover a number of other artists, most famously painter Jean-Michel Basquiat - the first encounter between the two is dramatized in the 1996 movie Basquiat, in which musician David Bowie plays the role of Warhol.

Sources

• Paul Ember: "The Warhol Triple Play: Maris, Seaver & Rose". Presentation at the SABR 48 Convention, Pittsburgh, PA, June 22, 2018.

Related Sites

• The Andy Warhol Museum, in downtown Pittsburgh, PA