Andy Warhol On August 6, 1928, Andrej and Julia Zavacky Warhola gave birth to their son, Andrew Warhola in Forest City, Pennsylvania. At the age of 8 years old, Warhol contracted a rare and fatal disease of the nervous system, called Chorea. The disease left him bedridden for several months and in his spare time, Warhol first started drawing. He also suffered from a nervous disorder that would frequently keep Andy at home, and during those long periods, he would listen to the radio and collect pictures of movie stars around his bed. It was this exposure to current events at a young age that he later said shaped his obsession with pop culture and celebrities. Warhol later became a successful magazine and ad illustrator who became a leading artist …show more content…
Warhol later died on February 22nd, 1987, in New York City. Warhol graduated high school and enrolled at the Carnegie Institute for Technology (now known as Carnegie Mellon University) to study pictorial design. Warhol graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1949 and moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. During this time, Andy shortened his name from Warhola to Warhol, and decided to strike out on his own as a serious artist. He ended up landing a job with Glamour magazine and was on the verge to become one of the most successful commercials artists at his time. Warhol started to win awards for his unique style, where he used his own blotted line technique and rubber stamps to create his one of a kind drawings. In the late 1950s, Warhol took a turn in his art and devoted more attention to painting. He debuted the concept of pop art, which was paintings that focused on mass produced commercial goods. In 1962, he debuted one of his most popular works, of Campbell’s soup cans. Warhol’s work started to create a major stir in the art world, bringing pop art and Warhol into the national spotlight. Warhol’s other famous pop paintings included Coca-cola …show more content…
Warhol described the influence of pop art as, “Once you ‘got’ pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again.” Pop art is art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values. Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art. Pop art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern art. The pop art movement aims to blur the boundaries between “high” art and “low” culture by creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars. It is said that pop artists search for traces of trauma in the mediated world of advertising, cartoons, and popular imagery at large. But it is perhaps better to say that pop artists recognize that there is no unmediated access to anything, such as the soul, the natural world or the built environment. Pop artists believe that everything is interconnected, and they try to make those connections literal in their artwork. While pop art encompasses a wide variety with very different attitudes and postures, much of it is somewhat emotionally removed. In contrast to the “hot” expression of the gestural abstraction that precede it, Pop art is generally “coolly” ambivalent. Andy Warhol was definitely the most successful and