Andy Warhol (1928-1987) American, Framed 1982 Movie Poster. Made for the film "Querelle," adapted from Jean Genet's 1947 novel. 

Overall: 42 1/2 X 35 3/4 in. 

Sight: 33 1/2 X 27 1/4 in. 

#2756 . 

Andy Warhol was born Andy Warhola in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of working class Slovakian immigrants. His father was a construction worker and died in an accident when Andy was 13 years old. A sickly child and often confined to bed, Andy showed an early talent in drawing and painting. After high school he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He graduated in 1949 and dropped the “a” from his last name, then moved to New York where he worked as a commercial illustrator for magazines such as Vogue, Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar. His whimsical and distinct drawing style quickly gained attention, and in 1952 Andy had his first one-man show at the Hugo Gallery in New York. He began to shift away from the prevailing Abstract Expressionism of the day and incorporate Realism in the early 1960s when he started painting ordinary mass produced items like Campbell Soup cans, Brillo Boxes and Coke bottles, which polarized the New York art scene and made him into a celebrity. From 1962 on he started making silkscreen prints of famous personalities like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy among others, which remain popularly reproduced items to this day. The quintessence of Andy Warhol art was to remove the line between Fine Arts and Commercial Arts used in magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums and advertising campaigns. He compared department stores to museums, and frequently insisted in interviews that he was not actually an artist. His eccentricity and unique personal style also made his name synonymous with the Pop Art movement he is credited with starting. In the mid 1960s Warhol experimented with the medium of film, exploring such rhetorical topics as time, boredom, and repetition, and established The Factory, his art studio/hangout/film stage where he and his assistants congregated with B-film actors, fringe philosophers, indie musicians, celebrities and the social elite, all of which inspired or took part in Warhol’s creative mass production process. In June of 1968 he was shot at point blank range by Valerie Solanis, a minor figure in the Factory crowd whose radical feminism and mental instability convinced her that he was an oppressive force in the world and directly over her. He spent two months in the hospital, never fully recovering and forced to wear a bandage around his torso for the rest of his life. The assassination attempt caused a radical shift in his process of producing art, and he became more reclusive and focused on creating commissioned portraits of the rich and famous, including Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli, and Brigitte Bardot. He founded inter/VIEW magazine in 1969 (later changed to Interview in 1971) and published “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” During the 1980s Warhol collaborated with younger emerging artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He died on February 22nd, 1987 from unexpected complications after gallbladder surgery. More than 2,000 people attended the memorial mass held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Warhol’s will dictated that his estate be used to create a foundation dedicated to the “advancement of the visual arts,” and later that year the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was founded in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The museum the foundation built in 1994 holds his permanent collection and archives, making it the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world. Perhaps more than any other artist of his era, Andy Warhol served as a cultural anthropologist, recording the fascinating and ever-changing American culture that existed in the middle of the 20th century, exploring the effects of Capitalism, consumerism, and homogenization on all aspects of Art.