Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol made mechanical reproduction the subject of art and dissolved the boundary between fine art and commerce. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928 to Rusyn immigrants from what is now Slovakia, he had childhood chorea that kept him bedridden for long periods, drawing and collecting film-star photographs. He studied pictorial design at Carnegie Tech and moved to New York in 1949. He became one of the most successful commercial illustrators of the 1950s, known for shoe advertisements drawn with a blotted-line technique, and won awards while wanting to be taken seriously as an artist. In 1962 he exhibited thirty-two Campbell's Soup Cans, one for each variety, painted with a projector and stencils. He then adopted silkscreen printing, which allowed him to reproduce photographic images repeatedly with deliberate flaws — Marilyn Monroe, made in the weeks after her death, Elvis, Jackie Kennedy, and the Death and Disaster series of car crashes, electric chairs and race riots taken from press photographs. The repetition drains the image of feeling, which is the argument. He said he wanted to be a machine and named his studio the Factory. It became a social and production centre where he made hundreds of films, including the eight-hour Empire and the Screen Tests, and managed the Velvet Underground. On 3 June 1968 Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in one of his films, shot him in the chest. He was pronounced clinically dead and needed a corset for the rest of his life. He founded Interview magazine, made commissioned portraits of the wealthy, and predicted fifteen minutes of fame. He died in 1987 after gallbladder surgery.

• Lived: 1928 CE – 1987 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: painter, printmaker