Warhol, << WAWR hawl, >> Andy (1928-1987), was an American artist best known for his images of common objects or 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. The process gives his work a mass-produced and impersonal appearance. Warhol often derived his subject from advertising or the mass media. He isolated and simplified these images, sometimes enlarging them in a series tinted 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. He often worked in series, variously treating themes that some people have considered a catalog of the preoccupations of the time. These subjects included disasters, such as newspaper images of death and destruction. His subjects also included celebrities, notably movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and Chinese political leader Mao Zedong. Warhol also produced a significant body of film work.
Warhol was born on Aug. 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh. After graduating from the art school of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949, he moved to New York City. There he became a successful commercial artist before achieving recognition as a painter about 1962. He died on Feb. 22, 1987.
