Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, Andy Warhol (born as Andrew Warhola) was raised in a poor, working-class family throughout the Great Depression. As the youngest of three boys, Warhol was a sickly and sensitive child who perhaps beckoned extra attention, leading to him being doted on by his loving mother who he later moved into his New York apartment. She spent her latter days nurturing her youngest son, cooking and cleaning, asking when he was going to find a wife and tending to her many cats.
His strict but hard-working father, who recognised his son’s artistic talent very early on and saved enough money to pay for his college education, passed when Warhol was thirteen. Before his death, he expressed his wishes that Warhol would continue his education in college. Warhol later graduated with a degree in Pictorial Design in 1949 – making his father’s hard work and confidence in him well warranted.
Warhol struggled with self-confidence in his younger years after a bout of rheumatic fever dramatically affected the appearance of his skin. He also struggled with premature baldness, which inspired him to amass a large collection of wigs, forming a key part of his visual identity when he reached fame. Warhol’s friend, and later lover, John Giorno, mused on Warhol’s relationship with his own appearance, “he always thought he was ugly. He always thought everybody else was beautiful. He always thought everybody else’s ugly body was beautiful.” It seemed that while Warhol could find beauty in other’s people’s insecurities, he couldn’t see past his own perceived flaws.
Sketching up success
Upon graduating in 1949, Warhol and his classmate Philip Pearlstein boarded a train to New York, ready to take the city by storm. After his first professional drawing, based on the concept ‘what is success’ was accepted for publication in Glamour magazine, Andrew Warhola was dropped, and Andy Warhol was born.
Warhol quickly found success amongst leading high-fashion magazines, including Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. Throughout the 1950s, he became a great success and towards the turn of the century he was earning around half a million dollars in today’s money. This gave him enough capital to buy him and his mother a townhouse on the East Side, big enough to accommodate her 25 cats (who later inspired his rare ‘Cats Named Sam’ series.)
Turning to fine art
It was the swinging sixties and New York was changing. There was an explosion in expression across the arts and the city was buzzing with life and diversity. Warhol had set his sights on breaking the world of fine art and through this, discovered an alluring world of music and celebrities. He started to experiment with advertising and comic strips as a form of art, forming a wider movement across artists in the city called ‘Pop Art’. Despite being a seemingly innocuous subject, the Campbell’s soup can was one of Warhol’s muses over this decade, and the red and white striped staple became a striking symbol of his work as an artist.
It was during this period that Warhol created some of the most recognised and iconic celebrity portraits to date, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Debbie Harry. He also leaned heavily into the technique of screen-printing. While at college, Warhol was often criticised for his unique approach in coining new and creative ways to repeat images, this lent itself to this new way of working, creating art that enabled anyone to physically make screen-prints of the paintings he conceived. It was in this period in 1964 that he joked to his friend, ‘I want to be a machine.’
Inside Warhol’s factory
In 1962, Warhol opened ‘The Factory’ in the first of three locations. As well as being used to churn out his screen-prints, The Factory developed a reputation as a venue for debauched parties, attracting some of the most prevalent figures in New York at the time. Mary Woronov, who visited The Factory in the 1960s, spoke of its strange appearance, “It was so dark that you couldn’t see any art. The place had silver foil all over it.” Many others commented on the competitive nature of Andy’s young entourage, including Fran Lebowitz who noticed that, “Andy always had some rich kids around him but also people who were incredibly flamboyant, incredibly transgressive. They were there for his amusement.”

Warhol began to see greater success as an artist than ever before throughout the sixties, with work exhibited in the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. He also started to explore other artistic avenues over this time, experimenting as a filmmaker as well as delving into the world of music. Between 1965-1967, he managed The Velvet Underground, which led to them releasing their album ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’, often referred to as the ‘the banana album’ due to the banana-emblazoned album cover designed by Warhol himself. The Velvet Underground frequently rehearsed and performed in The Factory.
A shot in the dark
In 1968, something happened that changed Warhol’s attitude to welcoming people into his workspace forever. In a mentally unstable state, radical feminist Valerie Sonas shot Warhol three times after her relationship with him had soured. While the first two shots missed, the third hit and critically wounded him. After the bullet ripped through his lungs, stomach, liver, oesophagus, and spleen, Warhol was at one point clinically declared dead. While he did make a slow and painful recovery, Warhol and The Factory had changed forever.
The Factory moved to a new location, adopted a strict new door policy, weighted toward the rich and famous, and was manned by a full-time security team. Warhol became increasingly paranoid and withdrawn, focusing his attention on creating darker art pieces. This is the stage in his life which inspired series like ‘skulls’ and ‘guns’. He became increasingly focused on the commercial side of art, which in turn made his work less experimental. His focus shifted away from filmmaking and in 1969 he founded what was to become ‘Interview’ magazine and became ingrained in the world of celebrities.
The idea is not to live forever, but to create something that will
Andy Warhol
Life after death
Following the shooting, Warhol developed a loathing of hospitals, a fear which eventually led to his death in 1987. Warhol died of cardiac arrest after long-delayed gallbladder surgery which, if treated earlier, may have had a different outcome.
Like Warhol said, he didn’t live forever, but he did create art that will immortalise him. To this day, his prints can be found in our everyday lives across the world, from our homes to our clothes. His name, amongst the likes of David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein, has become synonymous with the Pop Art movement. His revolutionary and innovative work is proudly exhibited across the most revered art galleries, including the Tate, NYC’s Museum of Modern Art and perhaps most poignantly, at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where it all began.
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Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/style/andy-warhol-factory-history.html
https://crystalbridges.org/blog/early-life-andy-warhol
https://www.warhol.org/andy-warhols-life/
https://carnegiemuseums.org/magazine-archive/2014/summer/feature-430.html
https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-andy-warhol/series-cats-named-sam
https://www.halcyongallery.com/news/108-andy-warhol-campbell-s-soup-cans-5-things-to-know
https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-andy-warhol/guides/5-things-to-know-about-warhols-factory
https://magazine.artland.com/andy-warhol-portraits-a-definitive-guide/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/style/andy-warhol-factory-history.html
https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-andy-warhol/articles/andy-warhol-assassination-attempt-impact
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https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-andy-warhol/guides/where-to-see-andy-warhols-most-famous-works