Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) art encapsulates the 1960s through the 1980s in New York. By imitating the familiar aesthetics of mass media, advertising, and celebrity culture, Warhol blurred the boundaries between his work and the world that inspired it, producing images that have become as pervasive as their sources. Warhol grew up in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh. His parents were Slovak immigrants, and he was the only member of his family to attend college. He entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1945, where he majored in pictorial design. After graduation, he moved to New York with fellow student Philip Pearlstein and found steady work as a commercial illustrator at several magazines, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New Yorker. Throughout the 1950s Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist, winning several commendations from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in 1952, showing drawings based on the writings of Truman Capote; three years later his work was included in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art for the first time. The year 1960 marked a turning point in Warhol’s prolific career. He painted his first works based on comics and advertisements, enlarging and transferring the source images onto canvas using a projector. In 1961 Warhol showed these hand-painted works, including Little King (1961) and Saturday’s Popeye (1961), in a window display at the department store Bonwit Teller; in 1962 he painted his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans, thirty-two separate canvases, each depicting a canned soup of a different flavor. Soon after, Warhol began to borrow not only the subject matter of printed media, but the technology as well. Incorporating the silkscreen technique, he created grids of stamps, Coca-Cola bottles, shipping and handling labels, dollar bills, coffee labels, and more, breaking down the images to their basic graphic components. In 1963 Warhol established a studio on East 47th Street, which became known as the Factory and served as a cultural hub for artists, models, performers, and socialites. His inner circle comprised his Superstars, who played a major role in both his work and his social life. Interested in the production of fame, Warhol began to screen-print images of celebrities and public figures, from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley to Jackie Kennedy and Mao Zedong. Expanding his practice, as well as his cultural influence, he produced records (The Velvet Underground & Nico), started a magazine (Interview), and made avant-garde films, such as Chelsea Girls (1966), Blow Job (1964), and Empire (1964), which have become classics of the underground genre. Following a close run-in with death when Valerie Solanas shot him in 1968, Warhol entered a more subdued, isolated period, working primarily on a commissioned basis and painting portraits for various patrons, while also revisiting themes from his earlier work. He then began to pursue a new interest in abstraction, first with his Oxidations (1977–78), made by allowing friends and acquaintances to urinate on canvases painted with metallic pigments, and later with his Rorschach (1984) and Camouflage (1986) paintings. By the early 1980s Warhol was producing work across media with a renewed vigor, hosting half-hour programs on MTV, publishing books, and collaborating with younger artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. His abstract series coincided with large-scale works that looked back at masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci: he screen-printed images of the Mona Lisa (1503) and created several monumental canvases of The Last Supper (1495–98). Warhol’s ability to seamlessly combine art historical reference, abstract patterns, and mass media set new standards for the role of the artist, permanently blurring the lines between commercial and fine art.

Works

Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140) Mick Jagger (FS II.140)
Mick Jagger (FS II.140)
1975
Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142) Mick Jagger (FS II.142)
Mick Jagger (FS II.142)
1975
Flash - November 22, 1963 (Kennedy) Flash - November 22, 1963 (Kennedy)
Flash - November 22, 1963 (Kennedy)
1963

Public Collections

The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover
Akron Art Museum, Akron
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Artists Rights Society, New York City
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton
Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown
Canton Museum of Art, Canton
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, Nashville
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati
City Museum, Amsterdam
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
Denver Art Museum, Denver
Dia: Beacon, Beacon
Figge Art Museum, Davenport
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco
Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge
Gallery of Modern Art, Frankfurt an der Oder
Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, CUNY, Flushing
Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga
International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum, Newport
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables
Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair
Munson, Utica
Museum of American Bird Art, Canton
Museum of Art at Brigham Young University, Provo
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm
Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City
Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando
Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami
Portland Museum of Art, Portland
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Altoona
Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence
Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute
Tate Britain, London
Tate Modern, London
The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton
The Columbus Museum, Columbus
The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton
The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota
The Menil Collection, Houston
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
The University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses, Oxford
Town Linz Gallery/Wolfgang Gurlitt, Linz
Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson
University of Maryland Global Campus Arts Program, Adelphi
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie
USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven