Born in Pennsylvania in 1930 with the name Andrew Warhola, Andy Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949. He then moved to New York City where he became involved in commercial art and won several prizes. His development in fine art began with wry, delicate drawings and culminated in the hard-hitting graphic style that made him so successful. He had a solo show in New York's Stable Gallery in 1962 and it brought him instant fame.
             In his studio, he mass-produced many of the pieces that we see today. The pop artist not only depicted mass products but also wanted to mass-produce his own works of pop art. Consequently, he founded The Factory in 1962. It was an art studio where he employed in a rather chaotic way "art workers" to mass produce mainly prints and posters but also other items like shoes designed by the artist. The first location of the Factory was in 231 E. 47th Street, 5th Floor (between 1st & 2nd Ave). Warhol's favorite printmaking technique was silkscreen. It came closest to his idea of the proliferation of art. Apart from being an Art Producing Machine, the Factory served as a filmmaking studio. Warhol made over 300 experimental underground films - most rather bizarre and some rather pornographic. His first one was called "Sleep" and showed nothing else but a man sleeping over six hours.
             Andy wanted to depict America's attitude of the time, and this time for that matter. He identified America's vacant icons with his paintings of Coke bottles and Brillo pads and the lure of the meretricious in his celebrity portraits of Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and others. Warhol's painting mirrored American consumer society but declined to judge it; any indictment of twentieth-century life was in the eye of the beholder. Even the disturbing "disaster" pictures of electric chairs, suicides, and car crashes suggest no more than the fascination of grisly tabloid scenes.
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