ANDY WARHOL

Originally a successful commercial artist, Andy Warhol was a leading pop artist. He became internationally recognized as much for his flamboyant lifestyle as for his artwork.
Andy was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US. He was the son of Czechoslovakian immigrants. In childhood, he contracted an unpleasant illness that left him with facial disfigurement. This made him quite nervous,  detached from other children, and a hypochondriac.
Andy grew up Drawing,  listening to the radio, and collecting pictures of film stars. At 14,  he studied art appreciation and commercial l art at the Carnegie institute of technology and Pittsburgh. in 1949; he moved to New York, where he dressed department store windows and worked as a commercial artist designing magazines and advertisements. 
During the 1950s, he began producing loose-blotted ink drawings of shoe advertisements, and after exhibiting these, RCA records hired him to design album covers and promotional materials. Unusually, he began exploiting his commercial printmaking process as fine art images. One of the elements of these processes was that he left in mistakes, so smudges, smears, and off-registered marks became a feature of his art. In 1962 Andy had his first New York solo pop art exhibition that included his Marilyn diptych, 100 soup cans, 100 Club bottles, and $100 bills. These mass-produced images of things seen every day, such as brillo pad boxes, Campbell Soup cans, comic strip characters, movie stars, and Coca-Cola bottles presented as fine art, were accessible to the masses and reflected the era of consumerism he was living in and stated that art was for everyone. Concurrently he founded the studio The Factory, which became a meeting place for New York's avant-garde. There he produced his art and short underground films. In 1964 he took part in a new exhibition,' "The American supermarket,"' that was presented as the interior of a typical American small store, except that everything in it was created by six pop artists. Warhols print of a  can of Campbell's soup exhibited there cost $1,500, and each autographed can sold for $6. The show triggered the question of what is art? Warhol was making the point that celebrity- whether a person or a brand-  had replaced true values. His series, whether of Marilyn Monroe, dollar bills, or soup cans, were to point out the public's obsession with fame, branding, and society's excesses in a media-saturated culture. His ideas transformed art, its culture and the way it is made, and what is acceptable in the art world