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Andy Warhol

American, 1928 - 1987

BiographyAmerican Pop artist. The son of Ruthenian immigrants, Warhol was born in Pittsburgh where he studied art at the Carnegie Institute. He moved to New York in 1949 and became a successful fashion illustrator. In 1960 he painted works inspired by popular comics in a free, somewhat Expressionist manner, but two years later, with painted and screened replica images of Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles (Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962; New York, Whitney Mus.), established his unique personal style. Warhol, the epitome of cool, took artistic impersonality to extremes, choosing banal subjects, including popular icons (The Twenty-Five Marilyn’s, 1962; Stockholm, Moderna Mus.), and executing them mechanistically, usually by silkscreen, using assistants. Occasionally darker subjects appear, accidents and executions, like 129 DIE IN JET (1962; Cologne, Ludwig Mus.), but they are treated equally objectively. In 1963 he began filmmaking, progressing from the silent, virtually static Sleep (1963) to the bizarre, sexy Chelsea Girls (1966) starring the exotic coterie based on The Factory, his New York studio. Warhol's work, undemanding and instantly recognizable, was highly fashionable and he moved in starry circles, the artist as celebrity.

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