Andy Warhol

• 1. Introduction

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  Andy Warhol died at 6:31 in the morning on the 22nd of February 1987, in a private room at New York Hospital, from a sudden cardiac arrhythmia following what his doctors had considered a routine gallbladder procedure. He was 58 years old. Within hours of his passing, the art world began recalibrating around the question of what exactly had been lost. The answer, it turned out, was singular. Born Andrew Warhola Jr. in Pittsburgh on the 6th of August 1928, Warhol would spend six decades dismantling the wall between commerce and culture, between the grocery shelf and the museum wall, between the celebrity photograph and the painted canvas. His studio, a silver-coated loft called the Factory, drew drag queens, poets, rock musicians, bohemians, and the very wealthy into the same room. His films, numbering more than 600 by the mid-1960s, ran for hours in near silence and dared audiences to sit still. His phrase "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" arrived not as prophecy but as a quiet, amused observation. Who was the son of Rusyn coal-country immigrants who came to define American visual culture? What chain of accidents, illnesses, and stubborn reinventions carried a boy from a Pittsburgh tenement to a $195 million painting? And how did the Factory's silver walls eventually give way to boardroom discipline and billion-dollar auction records? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. Pittsburgh Roots

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  At the age of eight, Warhol contracted a streptococcal infection that progressed to scarlet fever and then to the neurological condition Sydenham's chorea, sometimes called St. Vitus' Dance. Because no antibiotics existed to treat it, the illness confined him to bed for extended stretches and kept him home from school. He filled those days cutting images from Hollywood magazines, assembling scrapbooks, and sketching. His mother bought him comic books to cut up. His father and brothers built him a darkroom in the family basement after noticing his fascination with the Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera. Those bedridden years were, in hindsight, a kind of accidental art apprenticeship.

  His parents, Andrej and Julia Varchola, had emigrated from Miková, a village in what is now northeast Slovakia. His father had arrived in the United States in 1912, found work in a coal mine, and waited nine years before his wife joined him in 1921. The family rented modest addresses in Oakland, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where Warhol grew up, and attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. In May 1942, when Warhol was preparing to graduate from Holmes School, his father died of tubercular peritonitis contracted after drinking contaminated water from a coal mine in West Virginia.

  Despite the family's circumstances, Warhol won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh after graduating from Schenley High School in 1945. A summer job as a produce huckster in 1946 produced a series of pen-and-ink drawings that satirized his customers and documented the social gap between the affluent and working-class families on his route. That series won one of the annual Leisser Art Fund awards, valued at $40, given to Carnegie Tech students for the best visual representations of their summer activities. He described the job as a "wonderful experience" and said that "people are funny" - a remark that captured something essential about the artist he would become. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949.

• 3. The Commercial Years

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  Warhol arrived in New York City in June 1949 alongside his Carnegie classmate Philip Pearlstein, and they moved into a sixth-floor walk-up on St. Mark's Place near Tompkins Square Park. On his second day in the city, Warhol visited Tina Fredericks, the art director of Glamour magazine, carrying a portfolio of work completed at Carnegie. Fredericks purchased a small $10 drawing of an orchestra for her personal collection and then commissioned him to produce shoe illustrations. Glamour ran a full page of those shoe drawings alongside a feature titled "What Is Success?" It was the beginning of a commercial career that would make Warhol famous before he ever touched a silkscreen.

  Photographer John Coplans later recalled that "nobody drew shoes the way Andy did. He somehow gave each shoe a temperament of its own, a sort of sly, Toulouse-Lautrec kind of sophistication, but the shape and the style came through accurately and the buckle was always in the right place." By 1956, he was so busy with shoe illustrations for the manufacturer I. Miller that he had to turn down assignments. That same year he won the Art Directors Club Award for Distinctive Merit for his I. Miller drawings.

  Warhol's personal shoe illustrations for celebrities - including Truman Capote, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Zsa Zsa Gabor - were embellished with gold leaf and sold for $50 to $225 apiece at the Bodley Gallery in December 1956. In the same year, the Museum of Modern Art politely declined his gift of the drawing Shoe, citing storage constraints. MoMA's rejection did not keep his work out of the building: one of his shoe drawings was included in the museum's Recent Drawings U.S.A. group exhibition that same year, marking his first museum showing. The simultaneous refusal and inclusion at the same institution captured the contradictions that would follow Warhol for the rest of his life.

• 4. Soup Cans and Silkscreens

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  After seeing Claes Oldenburg's storefront installation The Store in December 1961, Warhol returned home frustrated, telling friends Ted Carey and Muriel Flatow that his comic-strip paintings no longer felt original enough. He accepted Flatow's tongue-in-cheek suggestion - offered in exchange for $50 - that he focus on what he liked most: money. The idea pointed him toward silkscreened images of dollar bills. To learn the technique, he turned to Floriano Vecchi of Tiber Press, who walked him through the basics of transferring designs onto acetate, preparing screens, and pulling ink with a squeegee.

  In May 1962, Time magazine named Warhol in an article about the "Slice-of-Cake School" alongside Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Wayne Thiebaud. He had already completed sixteen of his Campbell's Soup Cans paintings. Los Angeles dealer Irving Blum visited and was surprised to find Warhol without gallery representation, and offered him a solo show at the Ferus Gallery. Warhol sent 32 canvases to Los Angeles, each depicting a different variety of Campbell's Soup, and the exhibition opened on the 9th of July 1962, his West Coast debut.

  The same year, art dealer Sidney Janis included Warhol's work in a New York exhibition called The New Realists. The New Yorker compared its impact on the art world to an "earthquake." The Kansas City Star ran the headline "Which Way Is Modern Art Going? Hold Your Breath and Watch the Soup Cans." Warhol's first solo New York Pop show opened at the Stable Gallery on the 6th of November 1962 and drew rave reviews from critic Michael Fried, who wrote in Art International that Warhol was "probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular" of the painters working in popular iconography. In December 1962, MoMA hosted a symposium at which artists including Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were appalled by his open acceptance of market culture. He was unbothered. He claimed to have eaten Campbell's soup for lunch for twenty years.

• 5. The Factory

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  By 1964, Warhol had relocated his studio to 231 East 47th Street, a space that would become known simply as the Factory. Poet Gerard Malanga assisted with silkscreen and film production there, and Billy Name covered the walls and ceiling in aluminium foil and silver paint that same year. The Factory drew a shifting orbit of personalities including drag queens, poets, bohemians, musicians, and wealthy patrons, and produced what Warhol called his "superstars" - Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, International Velvet, Ultra Violet, Viva, and Candy Darling, among others - who appeared in his films and embodied his fascination with fleeting celebrity.

  Between 1963 and 1968, Warhol produced more than 600 underground films, including short black-and-white Screen Tests that offered silent, close-up portraits of Factory visitors. Sleep (1964) documented poet John Giorno sleeping for over five hours. Empire (1965) consisted of a single unmoving camera trained on the Empire State Building. Chelsea Girls (1966) ran in dual projection. Blue Movie (1969), an erotic film, led directly to Warhol renting the Fortune Theater at 62 East 4th Street to screen male pornographic films from the 25th of June to the 5th of August 1969, at an admission price of $5.

  In 1966 and 1967, Warhol managed the experimental rock group the Velvet Underground and incorporated them as the centrepiece of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia happenings. He funded their debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, released in 1967. His remark that "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" first appeared in a 1967 Time magazine article and became closely associated with the Factory scene. To finance his film productions, he began going on college lecture tours. During a West Coast tour in October 1967, Warhol sent actor Allen Midgette to impersonate him; when the substitution was discovered, he reimbursed the four institutions and returned to the campuses himself in 1968.

• 6. The Shooting and Its Aftermath

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  On the 3rd of June 1968, radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas shot Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya at the Factory. Solanas had authored the SCUM Manifesto and had appeared in Warhol's film I, a Man (1967). Amaya received minor injuries and was released the same day. Warhol was seriously wounded and remained in hospital for nearly two months. Solanas turned herself in to police hours after the attack and said that Warhol "had too much control over my life." She was subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to three years in prison.

  Complications from a second operation the following year left Warhol's abdominal muscles improperly repaired, requiring him to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life. Jed Johnson, a Factory assistant who had been present during the shooting, visited Warhol daily at the hospital. The two developed an intimate relationship, and after Warhol was discharged, Johnson moved in to help with his recovery and to care for his ailing mother. During Warhol's hospitalization, Paul Morrissey assumed filmmaking responsibilities and directed Flesh (1968), starring Joe Dallesandro.

  The attack changed the character of the Factory. Warhol credited Morrissey with transforming it into a "regular office." In August 1968, Warhol appeared in court after an investor in a cancelled film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre sued him for $80,000; the legal battle ran for two years before the plaintiff failed to appear in court. That same fall, Warhol and Ultra Violet attended a party celebrating the completion of Midnight Cowboy, a film that included a Factory party scene shot during Warhol's own hospitalization. The shooting created the dividing line between two Warhols: the anarchic provocateur of the silver Factory and the disciplined businessman who would found Interview magazine, write books, and build one of the most commercially successful art enterprises in American history.

• 7. Business Art

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  Warhol and British journalist John Wilcock founded Interview magazine in the fall of 1969, initially published as inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal. The magazine would come to represent Warhol's social life and fascination with celebrity. In November 1971, Warhol and business partner Paul Morrissey purchased Eothen, an oceanfront estate in Montauk, New York, which they began renting to figures including Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy, the Rolling Stones, Elizabeth Taylor, and Truman Capote. The same year, Warhol designed the cover concept and photography for the Rolling Stones' album Sticky Fingers, featuring a close-up image of a man's crotch in jeans with a working zipper, which earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Album Cover at the 14th Annual Grammy Awards in 1972.

  In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, published in 1975, Warhol stated directly: "I went into business art. I wanted to be an art business man or a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art." His critics saw this as a capitulation; he saw it as the logical extension of everything he had already been doing since he first sold shoe illustrations to Glamour. By the 1970s, Warhol was charging $25,000 for a commissioned portrait, with a discounted rate of $40,000 for two. His Mao screenprints debuted at the Leo Castelli Gallery in November 1972. In 1979, he was commissioned to paint a BMW M1 Group 4 racing car for the fourth installment of the BMW Art Car project. He was the first artist to paint directly onto the automobile rather than working from a scale model. It reportedly took him only 23 minutes. Drivers Hervé Poulain, Manfred Winkelhock, and Marcel Mignot drove the car at the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans.

  Artist Maurizio Cattelan later described the core of Warhol's achievement: "That's probably the greatest thing about Warhol: the way he penetrated and summarized our world, to the point that distinguishing between him and our everyday life is basically impossible, and in any case useless." His co-founding of the New York Academy of Art in 1980 alongside Stuart Pivar pointed in an unexpected direction. Pivar later observed that "Modernism got boring for Warhol ... But his overall game plan, what he really believed, was that the modern age was going away and that we were entering a neoclassical period." Late in his career, gallerist Alexander Iolas commissioned Warhol to create work based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper; the resulting Last Supper series (1985-86) became the largest series of religious-themed works by an American artist.

• 8. Auction Records and Legacy

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  When Campbell's Soup Can with Peeling Label (1962) sold at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1970 for $60,000, it set the highest price ever paid at public auction for a work by a living American artist. Warhol had been dead for nearly three decades when Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold at Christie's in May 2022 for $195 million, becoming the most expensive American artwork ever sold at auction. In between those two transactions lay an uninterrupted arc of rising values that art dealer Dominique Lévy described as "a seesaw being pulled uphill" - prices fluctuating but each successive peak landing higher than the last.

  In 2013, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) sold for $105.4 million at Sotheby's. In 2014 alone, Warhol's works generated approximately $569 million at auction, accounting for more than one-sixth of the global art market that year. Of the 22 versions of the Elvis series produced, eleven are held in museum collections. Eight Elvises (1963), depicting Elvis Presley in a gunslinger pose, was sold privately in 2008 for approximately $100 million. The Marilyn canvases alone have generated hundreds of millions of dollars: in 1998, industrialist S.I. Newhouse Jr. purchased Orange Marilyn (1964) at Sotheby's for $17.3 million; after Newhouse's death in 2017, hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin reportedly acquired it in a private sale for approximately $200 million.

  The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the city where the artist was born to Rusyn immigrant parents and where he was buried on the 26th of February 1987 at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, holds the largest permanent collection dedicated to a single artist in the United States. Warhol was interred near his parents, in the same city where a childhood illness had given him his first uninterrupted hours with a pencil and a pile of Hollywood magazines. His close friend Paige Powell tossed copies of the February and March issues of Interview magazine into his grave before the casket was lowered - a final gesture that was purely, unmistakably Warhol.