How Andy Warhol revolutionized the art world

Andrew Warhola was born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of immigrants from eastern Europe. After college, he changed his name to Andy Warhol and worked as a commercial artist. But he was fascinated by fine art, and combined the two to develop his serialized Pop Art that revolutionized the art world. He also lived openly as a queer man before the gay liberation movement.

In the 1950s, Warhol worked as a commercial artist for a shoe company. The use of details such as shoes, cans, eyes, or, as here, the lips of Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, were taken out of context and multiplied to create his signature style. The young Warhol exhibited his first prints in 1959 at the Bodley Gallery in New York. He quickly cultured an image of the "anti-artist."

It was not until 1961 that the young Warhol dared to exhibit his first paintings. An art dealer had asked the artist to base his canvas compositions on a subject that was important to him. Using stencils at first, Warhol painted serial pictures of dollar bills, soup cans and typewriters. For him, it was "the reproduction of the everyday." No one had ever dared to call such mundane objects art.

Strong and striking color contrasts were a hallmark of Warhol's unmistakable artistic aesthetic, along with repeated reproductions of the same motif rendered in different color combinations. Warhol abandoned painting in the early 1960s, preferring the silk-screen process. He also began making experimental and underground films and produced several records by the the band Velvet Underground

Warhol often used Polaroids as sources for his silkscreens, especially for his portraits. He took on numerous commissions for society portraits, a source of income that allowed him to pursue other projects — such as portraits of fellow artists whom he admired or collaborated with, like the singer Debbie Harry of the band Blondie, seen here.

Warhol’s breakthrough came with the "Campbell Soup Cans" in 1962, which became icons of the Pop Art movement. The artist was fascinated by mundane objects, but also by fame and celebrity, and the way that media can turn people, even major political figures like Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, into commodities – something Warhol’s own artistic practice exaggerated.

Shy and eccentric, Warhol was nonetheless idolized like a pop star in the art world. Fans of both sexes surrounded him at exhibition openings, as here in Zurich in 1978. A poster or a catalog signed by the famous American artist proved to be a valuable investment. Warhol quickly made a career for himself as the most famous representative of US Pop Art and was a fixture on New York’s social scene.

This "Self Portrait" has a hint of religious iconography. Warhol's parents came from a mountain village in the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Slovakia. They emigrated to America via Bremen in the 1920s. His mother's strong religious faith in the Byzantine Catholic Church had a great impact on the young Andy Warhol, and it occupied him again and again.

Along with profane subjects, Warhol’s work also featured references to the sacred. The influence of his religious upbringing was clearly evident in his late works: the cross and the depiction of Christ were very much on the artist's mind. Warhol's last series was a Pop Art meditation on Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," and he produced almost 100 variations on the theme.

Warhol understood how to market himself as well as his work. Early on, he adopted his trademark glasses and silver wigs. He resisted any attempts to psychoanalyze him, saying, "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it." Warhol died on February 22, 1987 after gall bladder surgery.

Decades after his death, Andy Warhol's legend lives on. One of his silk-screen portraits of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe, "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn," set a record at auction in 2022, selling for €177 million ($195 million) and becoming the most expensive work by an American artist sold at auction.