Andy Warhol Biography

It is rare for an artist to become a celebrity, but Andy Warhol experienced much more than his "fifteen minutes of fame", and became an icon of his generation. Andrew Warhola was born August Sixth, 1928, in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. He was the youngest son of Julie and Andrej Warhola, both immigrants from Czechoslovakia. In Fifth grade Andrew started attending the free Saturday classes that the Carnegie Institute taught. It is noted that even then young Andrew excelled at his art. Due to the bullying by his classmates he stayed inside a great deal, working on his art. Due to his aptitude in school, Andrew skipped two grades and was admitted into the Carnegie Institute of Technology at the young age of 16. Once in the school Andrew was admitted to the Department of Painting and Design. He studied various aspects of commercial graphic design. Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, with a degree in pictorial design. He then went to New York City to work as a commercial illustrator. Warhol was involved in many artistic fields such as painting, filmmaking and photography. . He got his first break in August 1949, when Glamour Magazine wanted him to illustrate a feature entitled "Success is a Job in New York". But by accident the credit read "Drawings by Andy Warhol" and that 's how Andy dropped the "a" in his last name. He continued doing ads and illustrations and by 1955 he was the most successful and imitated commercial artist in New York. In 1960 he produced the first of his paintings depicting enlarged comic strip images such as Popeye and Superman, which were initially for use in a window display.
Warhol pioneered the development of the process whereby an enlarged photographic image is transferred to a silk screen that is then placed on a canvas and inked from the back. It was this technique that enabled him to produce the series of mass-media images - repetitive, yet with slight variations - which he began in 1962. Warhol incorporated

Bibliography: 1. "Warhol, Andy," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. 2. "Pop Art and Consumer Culture" Christin J. Mamiya, University of Texas Press, Austin First Edition 1992. 3. "Art Forms" Duane Preble, Sarah Preble, and Patrick Frank, Sixth Edition 1998.