About Andy Warhol | Factory, Soup Cans & Pop Art

Pittsburgh, 1928

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on 6 August 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents, Andrej and Julia, were Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from what is now eastern Slovakia. As a child he had Sydenham’s chorea—St. Vitus’ dance—after scarlet fever. Months in bed with comic books, movie magazines, and drawing with his mother became the start of a lifelong appetite for pictures, celebrities, and repetition.

Carnegie Tech and New York

He studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and graduated in 1949. Then he moved to New York and became a commercial illustrator. His blotted-line drawings for I. Miller shoe ads in the New York Times, plus work for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, made him one of the most visible fashion illustrators of the 1950s. The job taught him how advertising already turned products into icons—a lesson he would take into the gallery.

Soup cans, Marilyn, and The Factory

Around 1962 Warhol switched from illustration to the art that made him famous. Campbell’s Soup Cans lined up thirty-two flavors like a supermarket shelf. After Marilyn Monroe’s death he silkscreened her publicity still into grids of flat, loud color. Elvis, flowers, and Brillo Boxes followed. At The Factory—first the silver studio on East 47th Street—assistants, Superstars, and a production-line silkscreen process turned portraiture into something closer to printing than to a single oil painting.

Repeated portrait tiles in flat Warhol colors, made in PictorX

Superstars and films

The Factory was also a film studio. Sleep (1963) watches a man sleep for hours. Empire (1964) holds on the Empire State Building until night takes over. Chelsea Girls (1966) split the screen between downtown lives. Superstars such as Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Candy Darling were both cast and brand. Warhol liked the camera to keep running: boredom, glamour, and celebrity were part of the same surface.

The shooting, 1968

On 3 June 1968 Valerie Solanas, who had appeared in his orbit and written the SCUM Manifesto, walked into The Factory and shot Warhol. He barely survived. The injury stayed with him—a surgical corset, a fear of hospitals, a colder public face. The open Factory of the 1960s tightened into a more guarded office.

Portraits, Interview, and after 1987

In the 1970s he became the society portraitist of the jet set: Mao, commissioned heads of politicians and stars, and Interview magazine (launched in 1969) as a gossip-and-glamour paper. He called business the most fascinating kind of art. He died in New York on 22 February 1987 after gallbladder surgery. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts still funds artists; The Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh in 1994 and remains the largest museum in North America devoted to a single artist.

Color grids you can try

Warhol’s silkscreens flatten a photo into a few inks, then repeat it until the face becomes a pattern. PictorX Warhol effects follow that idea without pretending to be the originals: Marilyn and Ten Marilyns tile a portrait, Che and Mao push political icons into candy color, and other looks borrow guns, bridges, and dollar signs. Open the Warhol effects page, pick a grid, and run it on your own picture.

Frequently asked questions

When was Andy Warhol born?

Andrew Warhola was born on 6 August 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant parents.

What was The Factory?

Warhol’s New York studio—first the silver loft on East 47th Street—where silkscreens, Superstars, and films were produced like a small factory line.

Who shot Andy Warhol?

Valerie Solanas shot him at The Factory on 3 June 1968. He survived, but the wound shaped the rest of his life.

Where is the Andy Warhol Museum?

In Pittsburgh, his hometown. It opened in 1994 and is the largest North American museum dedicated to one artist.

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