1928 - 1987

Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) grew up in Pittsburgh where he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.  He moved to New York after receiving his BFA and became a celebrated illustrator for various fashion houses, most famously drawing shoes for I. Miller & Sons.  He won major awards for his work from the Art Directors Club in New York.

An admirer of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in 1960 he began seriously to pursue a career in fine art.  Pop art, for which Warhol would become the central identifying figure, began not in the United States but in England where it was an exploration of the cultural influence of mass media, advertising, and commercial design.  It was, in other words, the world in which Warhol had been living for many years.  In 1964, the movement was featured in the United States pavilion at the 32^nd Venice Biennale and at that point, if not before, pop art became associated with America. 

Just before 1964 Warhol had begun painting with silkscreen photographic images which challenged the idea of a unique work of art.  The silkscreens were made with a team of assistants at his studio, called The Factory, which further removed the final work from the hand of the artist.

Warhol was, and remains, one of the most influential artists of he twentieth century.