ANDY WARHOL

Andy Warhol was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he studied commercial art. During his time there, Warhol served as art director of the student art magazine, Cano, illustrating a cover and a full-page interior illustration in 1949. These are believed to be his first two published artworks. Warhol earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949. Later that year, he moved to New York City and began a career in magazine illustration and advertising.

Warhol started his career as a commercial illustrator, producing drawings in "blotted-ink", a technique which he applied in much for advertisements and magazine articles. Some of his personal drawings were self-published in small booklets, such as Yum, Yum, Yum, Ho, Ho, Ho and Shoes, Shoes, Shoes. His most artistically acclaimed book of drawings is probably A Gold Book, compiled of sensitive drawings of young men.

By the beginning of the 1960s, he had become a very successful illustrator, however, that his profile as an illustrator seemed to undermine his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist.