Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol—born Andrew Warhola Jr. on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—was an American artist and filmmaker. He is often considered the most significant artist of the latter half of the 20th century. His work crossed painting, filmmaking, photography, publishing, and performance art. As a key figure in Pop art, Warhol examined how advertising, consumerism, mass media, and celebrity culture intersect. By embracing mechanical reproduction, he blurred the line between high art and popular culture. He also helped make the phrase “15 minutes of fame” widely known.

Warhol came from a working-class Rusyn immigrant family. His father, Andrej Varchola (Americanized as Andrew Warhola), was born around 1886 and died in 1942; his mother, Julia Warhola, lived from 1891 to 1972. Both were from Mikó, Austria-Hungary (now Miková, Slovakia). His father emigrated to the U.S. in 1912, working in a coal mine, and his wife joined him in 1921. The family lived first at 55 Beelen Street, then at 3252 Dawson Street in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. They were Ruthenian Catholic and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Warhol had two older brothers, Paul (1922–2014) and John (1925–2010), and an older sister, Maria, who died in infancy. His nephew James Warhola became a children’s book illustrator.

At age eight, Warhol caught a streptococcal infection that turned into scarlet fever. Without antibiotics, it led to rheumatic fever and then Sydenham’s chorea (St. Vitus’ Dance). He was often bedridden and missed school, spending time drawing, making scrapbooks from Hollywood magazines, and cutting out comic book images his mother bought him. He also used the family’s Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera; his father and brothers built him a basement darkroom after noticing his interest in photography.

In 1937, Warhol began art classes at Holmes School. His teacher spotted his talent and arranged Saturday drawing classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. His father died of tubercular peritonitis in May 1942, just as Warhol was finishing Holmes School—the result of drinking contaminated water years earlier in a West Virginia coal mine.

Warhol attended Schenley High School, where he did well both academically and artistically. His tenth-grade art teacher, Mary Adeline McKibbin, encouraged him to enter a national Scholastic art contest, which she helped organize locally. The competition drew tens of thousands of entries from across the U.S., with regional selections shown at the Carnegie Museum of Art. McKibbin later said Warhol won a Scholastic award, but biographer Blake Gopnik found that contemporary reports from 1944 and 1945 suggest he didn’t receive a major prize, scholarship, or War Bond award. At most, he likely earned an unpublicized honorable mention—the gold pin for which he reportedly still wore in the 1980s.

After graduating from Schenley in 1945, Warhol won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). He began his career as a commercial artist in New York before moving into fine art. His early silkscreen paintings include *Campbell’s Soup Can* (1962), *Marilyn Diptych* (1962), and *Coca-Cola (3)* (1962). By the mid-1960s, he turned to experimental films such as *Blow Job* (1964) and *Empire* (1965). He later directed underground films like *Chelsea Girls* (1966), *Four Stars* (1967), and *Blue Movie* (1969), featuring a rotating group of personalities known as Warhol superstars. His studio, the Factory, became a center for avant-garde experimentation, drawing drag queens, poets, bohemians, musicians, and wealthy patrons. Warhol also managed the Velvet Underground, who performed at his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events from 1966 to 1967.

After surviving an assassination attempt in 1968, the Factory turned into a business. Warhol founded *Interview* magazine, produced the play *Pork* (1971), and published books including *The Philosophy of Andy Warhol* (1975) and *Popism* (1980). He created painting series such as *Mao* (1972–73), *Athletes* (1977), and *Last Supper* (1986), and did commissioned portraits. He also moved into television with *Andy Warhol’s TV* (1980–83) and *Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes* (1985–87). He carefully documented his social life through photography and daily recordings, later published as *The Andy Warhol Diaries* (1989). Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia at age 58, after gallbladder surgery, on February 22, 1987.

Warhol has been called the “bellwether of the art market.” Several of his works rank among the most expensive paintings ever sold. In 2013, *Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)* (1963) sold for $105 million. In 2022, *Shot Sage Blue Marilyn* (1964) sold for $195 million, the highest auction price for a work by an American artist. He has been the subject of many retrospectives, books, and documentaries. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, holding an extensive permanent collection of his art and archives, is the largest U.S. museum dedicated to a single artist.