Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in August 1928. His original name was Andrew Warhola. His parents, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, had emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1922.
Andy showed an early talent in drawing and painting. After high school he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. In 1948, while still a student, he took a job at a Pittsburgh department store, painting backdrops for window displays. Warhol graduated in 1949 and went to New York where he worked as in illustrator for magazines like Glamour, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and for commercial advertising.
In the mid fifties he became the chief illustrator for I. Miller Shoes, and in 1957 a shoe advertisement won him the Art Director’s Club Medal.
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In 1955 he had an exhibition of overtly homosexual drawings at the Bodley Gallery, and although reviews and sales were poor, some of the less explicit drawing were selected for a show at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1956.
In the sixties he began a series of black and white paintings of nose jobs, wigs, television sets, charts of dance steps, all based in cheap ads found in magazines. Then he painted cartoon characters – Dick Tracy, Batman, and Popeye – then a coke bottle.
Then, according to legend, a fledgling gallery owner called Muriel Latow met Warhol, and he asked her to give him some ideas for the things he should paint. Her first suggestion was that he should paint money. The second was that he should paint a can of soup.
Warhol’s mother went out and bought one can of each of the 32 varieties of Campbell’s soup and he began to work, making individual ‘portraits’ of each can, seen against a plainwhite background. Warhol had found his subject. The paintings were first shown in Los Angeles in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery, were a huge success, and their fame spread