Andy Warhol was an American painter. He was a leading influence in the development of Pop Art. Warhol’s original name was Andrew Warhola, and he was born in Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania.
Early in the 1960s, Warhol started experimenting with artistic representations of various media, including adverts, newsprint headlines and other images from popular culture in the US. In 1962, he started working on his series of Pop Art portraits of Marilyn Monroe. He also worked, in a similar style, on portraits of other celebrities including Elvis Presley (News History, 2012). Also in 1962, Warhol partook in the New Realists exhibition. This event was the first significant survey of Pop Art.
Although he never formally came out, Warhol was well known as being homosexual. In 2002 in The New York Times, Holland Cotter called Warhol "the first major postwar artist to put gay identity at the very centre of his work" (The Sixties, 2008). According to Cotter, sex was vital part of Warhol's art. Cotter reported that Warhol devoted an entire collection of paintings to sexually explicit material, having taken hundreds of photographs of men and male sexual organs (The Sixties, 2008).
On 22 February 1987, Warhol died. His death was sudden and unexpected, after he underwent an operation on his gall bladder.
References
BBC History. (2012). Andy Warhol. Retrieved from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/warhol_andy.shtml
The Sixties. (2008). Sex, Drugs and Andy Warhol. Retrieved from http://sixties-
l.blogspot.com/2008/01/sex-drugs-andy-warhol.html
