Andrew Warhola was born on 6 August 1928 in Forest City, Pennsylvania, USA.
In 1949, Andy Warhol moved to New York City where he met Tina Fredericks, art editor of Glamour Magazine. Warhol's first jobs were doing drawings for Glamour, and women's shoes. During this time he also drew advertising for various magazines, including Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
In 1952, he had his first solo exhibition at Hugo Gallery, in New York, where he exposed the of drawings he made to illustrate stories by Truman Capote. During 1953 to 1955, he worked for a theater group on the Lower East Side designing sets. Around those years he started to dye his hair silver.
In 1960, Warhol began to make his first paintings. Most of them were based on comic strips of Dick Tracy, Popeye, Superman, and Coca-Cola bottles. In 1962, Warhol made paintings of dollar bills and Campbell soup cans and those works were the ones he included in the exhibition The New Realists, at the Sidney Janis Gallery, in New York. In November of 1964, he rented a loft at 231 East 47th Street to make it his main studio, The Factory. In December, he began production of Red Jackie, the first of the Jackie series. In 1964, his first solo exhibition in Europe, held at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris where Flowers series were exposed.
In 1965 the Institute of Contemporary Art, at the University of Pennsylvania held his first solo museum exhibition. During this year, he announced his retirement from painting, but he resume this activity again in 1972. During this time he met Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker (collectively known as The Velvet Underground), and a German-born model turned chanteuse called Nico. This was an alliance that forever changed the face of world culture.
In 1968, Warhol's first solo European museum exhibition was held at Moderna Musset, Stockholm. That year on June 3, 1968, Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas who was the founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). Luckily, Warhol survived the assassination attempt after spending two months of recovery in the hospital.
During the 1970s and 80s, Andy Warhol's status as a media icon skyrocketed, and he used his influence to back many younger artists. He resumed painting in 1972, although it was primarily celebrity portraits. The Factory was moved to 860 Broadway. In 1976, he did the Skulls, and Hammer and Sickle series. Throughout the late 70s and 80s, a retrospective exhibition was held, as Warhol began work on the Reversals, Retrospectives, and Shadows series. The Myths series, Endangered Species series, and Ads series followed through the early and mid 1980s. On 22 February 1987, Andy Warhol died following complications from gallbladder surgery at eh age of 58 years old.
