Andy Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York where he found steady work as a commercial artist. He worked as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker and did advertising and window displays for retail stores.
Prophetically, his first assignment was in 1949 for Glamour magazine for an article titled “Success is a Job in New York”. 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 - initially for use in a window display.
He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62.
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 - that he began in 1962. These, incorporating such items as Campbell's Soup cans, dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles, and the faces of celebrities, can be taken as comments on the banality, harshness, and ambiguity of American culture.
Later in the 1960s, Warhol made a series of experimental films dealing with such ideas as time, boredom, and repetition; they include Sleep (1963), Empire (1964), and The Chelsea Girls (1966).
In 1968, Valerie Solanis, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) walked into Warhol's studio, known as the Factory, and shot the artist. The attack was nearly fatal.
He founded inter/VIEW magazine in 1969, and published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again in 1975.
Firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world, and continued to paint portraits until his death in 1987.
