Andy Warhol ( ; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist and filmmaker. Widely regarded as the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, Warhol's practice spanned various media, including painting, filmmaking, photography, publishing, and performance art. A leading figure in the pop art movement, his work explores the relationship between advertising, consumerism, mass media, and celebrity culture. His embrace of mechanical reproduction challenged traditional boundaries between high and low culture. He is also credited with popularizing the expression "15 minutes of fame".
Born to working-class Rusyn immigrant parents in Pittsburgh, Warhol began his career as a commercial artist in New York before transitioning to fine art. Among his best-known early silkscreen paintings are Campbell's Soup Can (1962), Marilyn Diptych (1962), and Coca-Cola (3) (1962). In the mid-1960s, Warhol began devoting his attention to creating experimental films such as Blow Job (1964) and Empire (1965). He subsequently directed a number of underground films—including Chelsea Girls (1966), Four Stars (1967), and Blue Movie (1969)—featuring a shifting group of personalities known as Warhol superstars. His studio, the Factory, became a hub for avant-garde experimentation, bringing together drag queens, poets, bohemians, musicians, and wealthy patrons. Warhol also managed the influential rock band the Velvet Underground, who performed at his Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67) multimedia events.
After Warhol survived an assassination attempt in 1968, the Factory evolved into a business enterprise. He founded Interview magazine, produced the play Pork (1971), and published various books such as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) and Popism (1980). He executed several series of paintings—notably Mao (1972–73), Athletes (1977), and Last Supper (1986)—and commissioned portraiture, while expanding into television with Andy Warhol's TV (1980–83) and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes (1985–87). He meticulously documented his social life through photography and daily recordings, published posthumously as The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989). Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 58 following gallbladder surgery in 1987.
Warhol has been described as the "bellwether of the art market", with several of his works ranking 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 price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of his art and archives, is the largest in the United States dedicated to a single artist.
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola Jr. on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the fourth child of Andrej Varchola (Americanized as Andrew Warhola; c. 1886–1942 and Julia Warhola (née Zavacky, 1891–1972). His parents were working-class Rusyn emigrants from Mikó, Austria-Hungary (now Miková in northeast Slovakia).
In 1912, Warhol's father emigrated to the United States and found work in a coal mine. His wife joined him nine years later in 1921. The family lived at 55 Beelen Street and later at 3252 Dawson Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. They were Ruthenian Catholic and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Warhol had two older brothers, Paul (1922–2014) and John (1925–2010), as well as an older sister, Maria (1912; died in infancy). Warhol's nephew James Warhola, became a successful children's book illustrator.
At the age of eight, Warhol had a streptococcal infection that led to scarlet fever. Because there were no antibiotics to treat the illness, it progressed to rheumatic fever and ultimately the neurological condition Sydenham's chorea, sometimes referred to as St. Vitus’ Dance. At times he was confined to bed and made to remain home from school. He would spend these days drawing, creating scrapbooks from Hollywood magazines, and cutting out images from comic books that his mother bought him. He also enjoyed using the family's Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera, and after noticing his passion for photography, his father and brothers built a darkroom in the basement for him.
When Warhol started art classes at Holmes School in 1937, his teacher recognized his talent and arranged for him to attend Saturday drawing classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In May 1942, as Warhol was preparing to graduate from Holmes School, his father died of tubercular peritonitis, after having years earlier drunk contaminated water from a coal mine in West Virginia.
Warhol attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, where he excelled academically and artistically. His tenth-grade art teacher, Mary Adeline McKibbin encouraged him to enter a national Scholastic Corporation's art contest, which she also helped organize locally. The competition drew high school entries from across the United States, with tens of thousands of works submitted and regional selections exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art. McKibbin later claimed Warhol won a Scholastic award. However, biographer Blake Gopnik notes that contemporary coverage of the 1944 and 1945 contests suggests he did not receive a major prize, scholarship, or War Bond award. At most, Warhol appears to have earned an unpublicized "honorable mention," the gold pin for which he reportedly still wore in the 1980s.
After graduating from Schenley High School in 1945, Warhol won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. While working as a produce huckster in 1946, Warhol created a series of pen-and-ink drawings satirizing his customers and documenting social contrasts encountered during his route, from affluent to working-class families. His illustrations depicted everyday interactions and behaviors, including demands from "new rich" customers and chaotic scenes involving families and children. The series won one of the annual Leisser Art Fund awards, valued at $40, which were given annually to Carnegie Tech students for the best visual representations of their summer activities. Warhol described this job as a "wonderful experience" and said that "people are funny," offering an early indication of his interest in observing everyday behavior and social interaction.
As a student, Warhol worked part-time as a window dresser at Horne's department store and was reportedly threatened with expulsion on several occasions due to his attendance record. He also served as art director of the student art magazine, Cano, illustrating a cover in 1948 and a full-page interior illustration in 1949. These are believed to be his first two published artworks. Warhol earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949.
Commercial illustration and production design (1949–1955)
After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in June 1949, Warhol moved to New York City with his classmate Philip Pearlstein. They lived in a sixth-floor walk-up tenement building on St. Mark's Place near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. On his second day in New York, Warhol visited Tina Fredericks, art director of Glamour magazine, whom he had met during a brief visit the previous year. He presented her with a portfolio of work from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and Fredericks purchased a $10 drawing of an orchestra. She subsequently commissioned him to produce shoe illustrations for the September 1949 issue, marking the beginning of his career as a commercial artist. The issue featured a page of Warhol's shoe illustrations alongside pages illustrating the "ladder of success" for the magazine's feature "What Is Success?" Warhol continued contributing illustrations to Glamour and several other leading fashion magazines, including Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar, as well as doing covers for Dance Magazine and Interiors.