An artist does not have to be a recognisable name to be iconic and there are plenty of examples of men and women who can be described as heroic while being completely outside the public eye. Andy Warhol of course is not one of those names.
Everyone over a certain age and from certain countries should be aware of the Visual Art Movement,also known as Pop Art, behind which Andy Warhol was a driving force. So what was behind those iconic paintings?
Warhol - circa 1960
Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6th, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents were first generation immigrants, originating from what is now Slovakia but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Warhol suffered from hypochondria somewhat as a child and would lay in bed surrounded by pictures of contemporary movie stars. He later stated that these memories influenced some of his most famous work. Following high school, where he had shown some considerable artistic ability as a youth, he enrolled at Carnegie Institute of Technology’s School of Fine Arts. In 1949 he made the move to New York to take a job in advertising and magazine illustration. Warhol first garnered some sort of prominence here and he began to be hired as a freelancer, working on album covers and promotional materials for the emerging record industry. RCA records in particular was a major user of Warhol’s talents.
It was in the early 1960′s that Andy Warhol started to become known outside the confines of the varius industries in which he worked and in 1962 he held his first art exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. This was closely followed by Warhol’s New York solo debut in which some of the paintings that non-art enthusiasts associate with this period were displayed. These included the iconic 100 dollar bills, 100 soup cans and 100 coke bottles.