The son of Czechoslovak immigrants, Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was educated at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Moving to New York, he worked as a commercial artist for a number of years, attracting attention in particular with his advertisements for shoes. In 1962, he achieved notoriety with meticulously literal paintings, mesmerically repeated, of standard consumer items such as Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. He went on to paint "mass-produced" images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in the same way, stressing the connection between celebrity and consumerism.In 1963, Warhol was using photographic silk screen prints to mass-produce these deliberately banal images. He extended his range of subjects to include scenes of violence and apparent significance, such as race riots or car accidents, or even death, as in the electric chair series; but the silk-screen images still expressed the mood of repetition, banality and insipidness which underlies a consumerist perception of the world.
Equally impersonal was Warhol's film making, which began in the mid-1960s. Often using erotic subject matter, as in Chelsea Girls (1966), and homoerotic themes, as in My Hustler (1965), Warhol's films characteristically display a lack of plot, an unstructured improvisation and an unedited length, that draw the audience into a world where, despite the drugs, sex and bizarre events, nothing much is really happening. People buy and sell whatever commodity comes to hand, including themselves. However, Warhol claimed that the commercialism he appeared to mock was also a form of art. "Making money is art," he wrote, "and working is art, and good business is the best art".
Warhol soon became an icon of the counterculture of the 1960s. He was surrounded by an entourage of underground film and rock stars, exhibitionists, beautiful people, hippies and assorted misfits at his so-called Factory in New York, where he encouraged people to go to whatever extremes their personalities took them to. He was their still centre, emotionless in his silver wig. As an artist, he was icily democratic, believing that "if everybody's not a beauty, then nobody is," and declaring that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes.
Warhol exercised no control over his court, and in 1968 he was shot and almost killed by Valerie Solanas, the self-proclaimed leader of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). Thereafter, he put a distance between himself and the rest of the world, although he continued to produce prints depicting Hollywood celebrities and political figures. He published a monthly magazine, Interview, with illustrated articles about current celebrities. He also became increasingly religious, attending Mass regularly at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York.
Warhol's life and art may have acted as a sort of documentary of contemporary American culture, but he himself remained a transparent enigma, a "sphinx without a secret", as Truman Capote called him. Warhol put it better: "People call me a mirror," he said. "And if a mirror looks into a mirror, what does it see?" He died in 1987 after a gallbladder operation.
