English

I am going to do my personal study on Andy Warhol one of the most influential artist on the Pop Art movement. I hope to produce a realistic and correct account of his life and will be investigating his obsession with fame and money and whether he was in the art world for the money.

No other artist is as much identified with Pop Art as Andy Warhol. The media called him the Prince of Pop.

Warhol made his way from a Pittsburgh working class family to an American legend.

Andy Warhol the American artist, photographer and filmmaker was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh as the son of Czechoslovak immigrants. His father was as a construction worker and died in an accident when Andy was 13 years old.

Andy showed an early talent in drawing and painting. After high school he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Warhol graduated in 1949 and went to New York where he worked as an illustrator for magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and for commercial advertising. He soon became one of New York's most sought of and successful commercial illustrators. In 1952 Andy Warhol had his first one-man show exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in New York. In 1956 he had an important group exhibition at the renowned Museum of Modern Art.

In the sixties Warhol started painting daily objects of mass production like Campbell Soup cans and Coke bottles. Soon he became a famous figure in the New York art scene. From 1962 on he started making silkscreen prints of famous personalities like Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. The pop artist not only depicted mass products but he also wanted to mass-produce his own works of pop art. Consequently he founded The Factory in 1962. It was an art studio where he employed in a rather chaotic way "art workers" to mass produce mainly prints and posters but also other items like shoes designed by the artist. Warhol's favorite printmaking technique was silkscreen. It came closest to his idea of proliferation of art. Apart from being an Art Producing Machine, the Factory served as a filmmaking studio. Warhol made over 300 experimental underground films - most rather bizarre and some rather pornographic. His first one was called Sleep and showed nothing else but a man sleeping over six hours.

In July of 1968 the pop artist was shot two to three times into his chest by a woman named Valerie Solanis. Andy was seriously wounded and only narrowly escaped death. Valerie Solanis had worked occasionally for the artist in the Factory. Solanis had founded a group named SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and she was its sole member. When Valerie Solanis was arrested the day after, her words were "He had too much control over my life".

Warhol never recovered completely from his wounds and had to wear a bandage around his waist for the rest of his life.

After this assassination attempt the pop artist made a radical turn in his process of producing art. The philosopher of art mass production now spent most of his time making individual portraits of the rich and affluent of his time like Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson or Brigitte Bardot. Warhol was a homosexual with a slightly bizarre personality. In the fifties he dyed his hair straw-blond. Later he replaced his real hair by blond and silver-gray wigs.

The pop artist loved cats, and images of them can be found on quite a few of his art works. One of Andy's friends described him as a true workaholic. Warhol was obsessed by the ambition to become famous and wealthy. And he knew he could achieve the American dream only by hard work. In his last years Warhol promoted other artists like Keith Haring or Robert Mapplethorpe.

Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987 from complications after a gall bladder operation. More than 2000 people attended the memorial mass at St.Patrick's Cathedral.

-Andy Warhol a leader in the pop art craze of the 60's was born in 1928 and died in 1987. He was born with the name Andrew Warhola and like most young artists he was having trouble getting a job. Although he had trouble getting started in about 1949 he moved to New York City and gained success as a commercial artist. He first got a break when he landed a job in Glamour Magazine. They wanted him to illustrate a feature entitled "Success in a job in New York" but by accident the credit read drawings by Andy Warhol. After that he decided todrop the "a" in his name. Warhol was an American artist best known for his images of common objects and famous people. Warhol's style made him a leading figure of the pop art movement in the 1960's.

Warhol created most of his pictures with a mechanical stencil process called silk-screen printing. Warhol often derived his subject from advertising and people of high importance. He isolated and simplified these images, sometimes enlarging them in a series with various colors. He often repeated them many times in a single picture. Warhol's most familiar subjects are probably commercial products, such as soup cans and soft-drink bottles. His other works included pictures of disasters, such as newspaper images of death and destruction, celebrities, notably movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and Chinese political leader Mao Zedong. Although Warhol was an artist he also produced