Andrew Warhola Jr. was born on the 6th of August 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into a family of working-class Rusyn immigrants from Mikó, Austria-Hungary. His father, Andrew Warhola Sr., had emigrated to the United States in 1912 to work in a coal mine, and his mother, Julia, joined him nine years later. The family lived in the Oakland neighborhood, attending the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, where they were part of a tight-knit immigrant community. Warhol was the fourth child, with two older brothers, Paul and John, and an older sister, Maria, who died in infancy. At the age of eight, Warhol contracted a streptococcal infection that led to scarlet fever. Without antibiotics to treat the illness, it progressed to rheumatic fever and ultimately to Sydenham's chorea, a neurological condition sometimes called St. Vitus' Dance. For months, he was confined to bed and kept home from school. During this period of isolation, Warhol spent his 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. This early immersion in visual culture and the experience of physical vulnerability would shape his future artistic sensibilities.
The Shoe Illustrator
After graduating from Schenley High School in 1945, Warhol enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he studied commercial art. He joined the campus Modern Dance Club and Beaux Arts Society, and 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. After graduating, he 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, the art director of Glamour magazine, whom he had met during a brief visit to the city the previous year. He presented a portfolio of work completed at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which Fredericks received favorably, purchasing a small $10 drawing of an orchestra for her personal collection. She subsequently commissioned Warhol to produce shoe illustrations; after more than one attempt, his drawings were accepted. Glamour published a page of Warhol's shoe illustrations along with several pages of people climbing the