The Pop Icon

Born Andrew Warhola, Andy Warhol is best known for his wild, wacky contributions to the beginnings of the Avante Garde movement in New York. He showed promise as a young artist and attended the college for the School of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. What was then known as his “humble beginnings,” Warhol came a long way from classical art.

In the 1950’s he moved to New York and became an illustrator for many magazines. People were especially taken with his whimsical drawings in shoe ads. As the music industry grew, Warhol was hired along with one other artist to design album covers for many different upcoming bands.

He began his iconic work in the 60’s. Warhol produced many famous and distinct images of celebrities and common American food items. Among the most well-known are the Campbell’s Soup Cans and the Coca-Cola bottles. He said this of Coca Cola:

 What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

(Campbell's Soup Can)

Warhol’s success in the art world never waned; he created iconic pieces and founded the Avante Garde rock group The Velvet Underground. Towards the 1980’s though, Warhol began to take an entrepreneurial view of his art. He aided many young and up-and-coming New York artists and, though he became older, his passion for art never ceased to exist. Warhol died in 1987.  

(Coca-Cola)



 (Self Portrait)