OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in 1928, Andy Warhol remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol?s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his own prescient observation that ?everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.? His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.
After being graduated with a degree in Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949, Warhol moved to New York to work as an illustrator for magazines such as The New Yorker and Vogue. During the 1950s, Warhol enjoyed great success as a commercial artist. Following a decade of enormous success as an illustrator, Warhol looked toward Fine Art as a larger challenge. In 1960 he purchased a four-story townhouse and experimented with popular images that were known to everyone in everyday life.
The 1960s ignited an impressive and wildly prolific time in Warhol?s life. It is this period, extending into the early 1970s, which saw the production of many of Warhol?s most iconic works. Building on the emerging movement of Pop Art, wherein artists used everyday consumer objects as subjects, Warhol started painting readily found, mass-produced objects, drawing on his extensive advertising background. Warhol?s first solo show was at the Ferus gallery in Los Angeles in 1962 where he exhibited his Campbell?s soup cans. When asked about the impulse to paint them, Warhol replied, ?I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it?. The humble soup cans would soon take their place among the Marilyn Monroes, Dollar Signs, Disasters, and Coca Cola Bottles as essential, exemplary works of contemporary art.
Operating out of a silver-painted, and foil-draped studio nicknamed The Factory, located at 231 East 47th Street, (his second studio space to hold that title), Warhol embraced work in film and video. In 1968 Warhol suffered a nearly fatal gun-shot wound from aspiring playwright and radical feminist author, Valerie Solanas. The shooting, which occurred in the entrance of the Factory, forever changed Warhol. Warhol?s Factory was no longer an open studio and he began to meticulously document every aspect of his life.
In 1987 Warhol was hospitalized to have an infected gall bladder removed. Though the routine operation was successful, he died mysteriously during the early morning of February 22, 1987. He was 58 years old. The Warhol Foundation for the Arts was established from his estate and in 1994 the Warhol Museum opened in his childhood City of Pittsburgh. It houses the largest collection of his artwork.