A specific Monday afternoon. The Ferus Gallery, 723 North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, July 9, 1962. The gallery occupies a single ground-floor commercial space on the west side of La Cienega, between Melrose and Santa Monica. The dealer Irving Blum is hanging an exhibition by a Pittsburgh-born New York commercial illustrator named Andy Warhol, thirty-three, whom Blum has met twice and barely knows. The exhibition consists of thirty-two paintings, each twenty inches by sixteen inches, each depicting a single can of Campbell’s Soup. Each painting depicts a different flavor (Tomato, Chicken Noodle, Pepper Pot, Black Bean, Vegetarian Vegetable, and twenty-seven others), and the paintings are hung in a single horizontal row along the gallery’s white walls at approximately the height a supermarket would shelve the actual cans. The exhibition opens on the evening of July 9 and runs through August 4. Five paintings will sell during the show, each at $100, before Blum (recognizing what he has) reverses the sales and buys the entire set back from the buyers for the full price. The complete thirty-two-painting set will eventually be sold to the Museum of Modern Art in 1996 for approximately $15 million. The 1962 Ferus exhibition is the moment American commercial advertising imagery enters the serious fine art canon. The pivot is permanent.
Andrew Warhola of Pittsburgh
The biographical origin. Andrew Warhola was born on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the third of three sons of Ondrej and Julia Warhola, Slovak immigrants from the village of Mikova in what was then Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia). His father Ondrej (Anglicized to Andrew Sr.) worked in the Pittsburgh coal mines and as a construction laborer; his mother Julia kept house and produced devotional folk-art drawings. The family was Carpatho-Rusyn Catholic and attended the Byzantine Catholic Church of St. John Chrysostom on the South Side.
Andrew Warhola was a sickly child. At age eight he contracted Sydenham’s chorea (then called St. Vitus’s Dance), a neurological complication of rheumatic fever, which kept him bedridden for several months. During the bedridden period he drew constantly, listened to the radio, and assembled scrapbooks of movie-star photographs from magazines. His father died in 1942 of tubercular peritonitis when Andrew was thirteen.
Warhola graduated from Schenley High School in Pittsburgh in 1945 and enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in the same year. He studied in the Department of Painting and Design, eventually choosing the Pictorial Design specialization within the program. His coursework included commercial illustration, advertising design, and fashion drawing. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in June 1949 at age twenty.
Three weeks after graduation, in late June 1949, Warhola took a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh to New York City. He moved into a small apartment shared with several Carnegie Tech classmates on the Lower East Side. He had approximately $200 and a portfolio of his college work.
The Commercial Illustrator
The 1950s career. Warhola’s first New York client was Glamour magazine, which commissioned him to illustrate a feature article titled “Success Is a Job in New York” in September 1949. The byline on the published illustration read “Andy Warhol” (the printer had dropped the final “a” from his surname, and Warhola adopted the spelling permanently). Over the next decade he built one of the most successful commercial illustration careers in postwar New York.
The breakthrough came in 1955 when the I. Miller shoe company, then one of the largest American manufacturers of women’s footwear, hired Warhol to produce weekly newspaper advertisements for the New York Times. Warhol’s illustrations for I. Miller (which ran from 1955 through 1957) used a “blotted-line” technique he had developed at Carnegie Tech: drawings traced in ink on non-absorbent paper and then pressed onto a second sheet while the ink was still wet, producing a slightly blotted, hand-printed-looking line. The I. Miller advertisements made him one of the most recognized fashion illustrators in the city.
Through the late 1950s Warhol also worked for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Tiffany & Co., RCA Records, and the New York Times Magazine. He won the Art Directors Club Award for Distinctive Merit in 1956 and again in 1957. By the late 1950s his annual income from commercial illustration was approximately $65,000 (roughly $730,000 in 2026 dollars).
He purchased a four-story townhouse at 1342 Lexington Avenue in 1959 and moved his mother Julia from Pittsburgh to live with him there. The townhouse remained his primary residence for the rest of his life.
The Pivot to Fine Art
The 1960-1962 transition. In 1960, Warhol began producing paintings on canvas in his Lexington Avenue studio. The first works were enlarged versions of comic-strip imagery: Popeye, Superman, Dick Tracy, and other newspaper-syndicated characters. Warhol showed several of these paintings to friends including the gallerist Leo Castelli, who told him that another artist (Roy Lichtenstein) was already developing the comic-strip subject matter and was scheduled to show at Castelli that fall. Warhol abandoned the comic-strip approach immediately.
In April 1961 the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue installed a window display titled “Five Pop Painters” using paintings by Warhol, James Rosenquist, and three others as backdrops for the fashion mannequins. The window display was the first major public exhibition of Warhol’s fine art work, although it was incidental to the store’s spring fashion presentation.
In the summer of 1961 Warhol began the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. The choice of subject was reportedly suggested by his Manhattan gallery acquaintance Muriel Latow, who told him over dinner that he should paint “something you see every day, something everybody recognizes, like a can of soup.” Warhol paid Latow $50 for the suggestion and went to a grocery store the next morning to buy thirty-two cans of Campbell’s Soup, one of each flavor available.
He painted the thirty-two canvases over the following nine months using casein paint, projected outlines, and hand-applied stencils for the gold fleur-de-lis. The series was complete by June 1962, in time for the Ferus Gallery exhibition opening on July 9.
The Silkscreen and Marilyn
The technical breakthrough. Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962, four weeks after the Ferus Gallery exhibition opened in Los Angeles. Warhol read the news at his Lexington Avenue studio and began the Marilyn portrait series within days. He used a publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara as the source image; the photograph was approximately the size of a postcard and showed Monroe in three-quarter pose with her head tilted slightly back.
For the Marilyn series Warhol abandoned hand-painting in favor of photographic silkscreen. The silkscreen technique, which had been used in commercial advertising and textile printing since the early twentieth century, allowed a photographic image to be transferred onto canvas through a porous mesh screen that the painter pressed ink through with a squeegee. The technique was mechanical and reproducible. A single screen could produce hundreds of identical impressions. The painter’s role shifted from image-maker to image-selector and image-multiplier.
Warhol produced approximately twenty-three Marilyn paintings between August 1962 and the end of 1962, in varying color combinations and in single, double, multiple-image, and grid formats. The canonical work, “Marilyn Diptych” (now held by Tate Modern in London), consisted of fifty silkscreened images of Monroe arranged in a ten-by-five grid across two adjacent canvas panels, one in color and one in black and white.
The silkscreen technique became Warhol’s primary medium for the rest of his career. Within twelve months of the Marilyn series he had produced silkscreen portraits of Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy (after the November 1963 assassination of her husband), Liz Taylor, and a series of “Death and Disaster” works depicting car crashes and electric chairs from newspaper photographs.
The Factory
The studio as cultural production node. In January 1964, Warhol rented the fourth floor of a commercial building at 231 East 47th Street in Manhattan, between Second and Third Avenues. The space was approximately 4,000 square feet and had been used previously as a hat factory. Warhol moved his silkscreen production into the new space and began calling it “the Factory.”
The interior decoration was done by Billy Name (born William Linich, a photographer and Factory regular who lived in the space for several years), who covered the walls, ceiling, and most of the furniture in aluminum foil and silver spray paint. The Silver Factory operated as both a working studio (with the silkscreen production tables, paint supplies, and finished canvases stacked against the walls) and a social space (with a couch, a record player, and an open-door policy that allowed friends, friends of friends, and curious visitors to walk in unannounced during working hours).
The regular cast of Factory inhabitants and visitors during 1964-1968 included Edie Sedgwick (the wealthy Massachusetts-born “Factory superstar” who became the canonical Warhol model in 1965-1966), Lou Reed (the lyricist and lead singer of the Velvet Underground), John Cale (the Welsh-born classical-music-trained violist of the Velvet Underground), Nico (the German singer and actress Christa Päffgen, whom Warhol added to the Velvet Underground in 1966), Ondine, Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro, and Mary Woronov.
Warhol produced approximately sixty experimental films at the Factory between 1963 and 1968, including Sleep (1963, five hours and twenty-one minutes of poet John Giorno asleep), Empire (1964, eight hours and five minutes of a static shot of the Empire State Building), Blow Job (1964), and Chelsea Girls (1966, a three-and-a-half-hour split-screen film that became Warhol’s most commercially successful work of cinema).
The Velvet Underground and the Shooting
The music and the assassination attempt. Warhol began managing the Velvet Underground in late 1965. He added Nico to the band, designed the iconic peelable-banana cover for their debut album, and incorporated the band into a touring multimedia performance series called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966-1967). The Velvet Underground & Nico was recorded in April 1966 at Scepter Studios in Manhattan and released by Verve Records on March 12, 1967. The album sold approximately 30,000 copies on its initial release but is now widely cited as one of the most influential rock records of the twentieth century.
In February 1968 Warhol moved the Factory from 231 East 47th Street to a larger sixth-floor space at 33 Union Square West, between 16th and 17th Streets. The new space was decorated more conservatively (white walls, polished concrete floors) and had a more formal staff structure. The open-door policy was modified.
On the afternoon of June 3, 1968, the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas, age thirty-two, entered the Union Square Factory carrying a .32 caliber automatic pistol. Solanas had written a manifesto titled SCUM Manifesto (1967) advocating the elimination of the male sex and had previously appeared in Warhol’s film I, a Man (1967). She had been pursuing Warhol for several weeks over a script he had reportedly lost. She fired three shots, hitting Warhol once through the chest. The bullet damaged his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, and both lungs.
Warhol was rushed to Columbus Hospital on East 19th Street. He was briefly pronounced clinically dead at 4:51 PM. Surgeons performed a five-and-a-half-hour operation that saved his life. He spent two months in the hospital and wore a surgical corset under his clothing for the rest of his life.
The Post-1968 Years
The mature career. Warhol’s working life changed permanently after the shooting. The open-door Factory was replaced with a more guarded business operation. The experimental film production tapered off. Warhol concentrated on commissioned portrait work, magazine publishing, and large-scale silkscreen series.
The portrait practice became his major income source. He produced silkscreen portraits of paying clients (typically wealthy collectors, celebrities, and corporate executives) at standard prices ranging from $25,000 to $40,000 per canvas in the 1970s. The client list included Mick Jagger (1975), Liza Minnelli, Halston, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland, the Shah of Iran, and dozens of others.
Warhol launched Interview magazine in October 1969 with the journalist John Wilcock and his Factory associate Gerard Malanga. The magazine published celebrity interviews conducted as transcribed conversations rather than edited features, and ran continuously for fifty years until ceasing publication in 2018.
Major works of the 1970s and 1980s included the Mao series (1972, 199 portraits of Mao Zedong painted after Nixon’s February 1972 visit to China), the Skull series (1976), the Dollar Sign series (1981), the Last Supper series (1985-1986), and the collaborative paintings with Jean-Michel Basquiat (1984-1985).
Warhol entered New York Hospital on February 20, 1987 for a routine gallbladder operation. The surgery on February 21 was reportedly successful. He died of cardiac arrhythmia in the hospital at approximately 6:30 AM on February 22, 1987, at age fifty-eight. He was buried in St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh.
Closing
The summary. The 1940s icon piece was about Rosie the Riveter, an image manufactured by the United States Office of War Information for war-labor mobilization. The 1950s icon piece was about Marilyn Monroe, an image manufactured by Twentieth Century Fox for Hollywood box-office returns. The 1960s icon piece is about Andy Warhol, an artist who manufactured icons of icons.
The pivot is structural. Rosie was an image of female industrial labor. Marilyn was an image of female commercial sexuality. Warhol’s images were images of other images: the Campbell’s Soup can (an image of a commercial product), the Marilyn Diptych (an image of an image of Marilyn), the Mao portrait (an image of an image of Mao). The shift moved the icon from depicting reality to depicting commercial representation itself.
The technical signature is silkscreen photographic reproduction. The studio signature is the Factory. The commercial signature is the celebrity portrait series and the Interview magazine. The biographical signature is the Solanas shooting on June 3, 1968 and the subsequent change in Warhol’s working life.
“Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” sold at Christie’s on May 9, 2022 for $195 million, the highest auction price ever paid for an American artwork and the highest for any twentieth-century artwork. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, opened on May 13, 1994, holds the largest single-artist collection in any North American museum. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, founded with the proceeds of his estate, distributes approximately $14 million annually in grants to contemporary visual artists. The Factory aesthetic, sixty-two years after the first silver-foiled walls, remains the dominant template for any commercial production operation that pretends to be an art studio.