Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to working-class Slovak immigrants. He would go on to found the Pop Art movement, transforming Campbell's soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Coca-Cola bottles into icons of American consumer culture and reshaping the boundary between fine art and mass media.
Andrew Warhola grew up in a cramped rowhouse in Pittsburgh's Soho neighborhood, the son of a construction worker who died when Andy was thirteen. A childhood bout of Sydenham's chorea, a nervous system disorder, kept him bedridden for months, during which he immersed himself in comic books, movie magazines, and drawing. He credited this period with shaping his fascination with celebrity and repetition.
After studying commercial art at Carnegie Institute of Technology, he moved to New York and built a career as an illustrator for magazines and shoe advertisements before pivoting, in the early 1960s, to fine art. His silkscreened images of Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and Marilyn Monroe collapsed the distance between advertising and art, and his studio, the Factory, became a legendary hub of musicians, drag queens, and socialites.
Warhol survived being shot in 1968 by a radical feminist writer, an event that darkened his outlook but didn't slow his output. He died in 1987 following complications from gallbladder surgery, having permanently altered how the world thinks about fame, repetition, and the value of an image.