| Happy Birthday Andy Warhol August 6, 1928 Andy Warhol, one of the most influential artists of the latter part of the 20th century, is born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Warhol was the son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and his father was a coal miner. He enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and graduated with a degree in pictorial design in 1949. He began painting in the late 1950s and took literally the advice of an art teacher who said he should paint the things he liked. In 1962, he received notoriety in the art world when his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap-pad boxes were exhibited in Los Angeles and New York. In the 1980s, after a period of relative quiet in his career, he returned to the contemporary art scene as a mentor and friend to a new generation of artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. With the rise of postmodern art, he came to be regarded as an archetypal role model by many young artists. On February 22, 1987, he died in the hospital of a heart attack shortly after a gall bladder operation. In 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh. Learn more and check out these titles |
