The Full Biography
Andy Warhol. Artist. Filmmaker. The man who made a soup can as famous as a saint.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a silver wig and a silkscreen of Marilyn, repeated until the face becomes a product. The year was 1962. What the still cannot show is Andrew Warhola Jr., a sickly boy in Pittsburgh, a commercial illustrator who drew shoes for a living, and a man who nearly died on a Factory floor in 1968 and then lived another nineteen years as if the wound were part of the work.
He was born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, to Andrej and Julia Warhola, Rusyn immigrants from Miková, in what is now Slovakia. The household was Byzantine Catholic, working-class, and tight. A sister died in infancy. Two brothers, Paul and John, stayed in the city’s orbit. Rheumatic fever, and then the St. Vitus’ dance that can follow it, kept Andy in bed for long stretches. Comic books and movie magazines did the rest. Julia drew. The boy copied. He studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, graduated in 1949, and went to New York with a portfolio and a name that still had an a on the end. The “a” came off as a business decision. Andrew Warhola became Andy Warhol. The blotted-line ads for I. Miller shoes, and the window work, and the album covers, paid the rent and made him, by the mid-1950s, one of the most successful commercial illustrators in the city. Fine art was a second shift that ate the first.
The door opened in 1962 and did not look like a door. Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Cans, one for each flavor, hand-painted, a grocery shelf installed as a chapel. The same year, after Marilyn Monroe’s death in August, he made the Marilyn Diptych: fifty faces, half in color, half fading to black. Everyday goods and a dead star, same method. Elvis. Liz. Troy Donahue. Dollar bills. Death and disaster — car crashes, electric chairs, a tuna-fish can that had poisoned people — silkscreened until horror became a repeat. Pop art had had other faces. It now had a clerk’s patience and a fan’s appetite. He was not inventing America. He was filing it.
In 1964 he opened the studio people still call the Factory, first on East Forty-seventh Street, silver foil on the walls, a place of work that advertised itself as a party. Assistants pulled screens. Gerard Malanga. Billy Name. Brigid Berlin. The Superstars — Edie Sedgwick, Baby Jane Holzer, Ingrid Superstar, Ondine — were both cast and payroll, depending on the afternoon. He made films the way he made cans: long, blank, stubborn. Sleep (1963), five hours of John Giorno sleeping. Empire (1964), eight hours of the Empire State Building. Chelsea Girls (1966), a split-screen that actually found a paying audience. He managed, for a stretch, the Velvet Underground, and he produced The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). The peelable banana on the cover is his. The band did the rest. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable sent the music and the light show on the road. He was, for a few years, the most complete American artist the downtown had hired to be both a clerk and a climate.
The Death and Disaster pictures — Orange Car Crash, Lavender Disaster, the electric-chair series he called Little Electric Chair — are the chapter the soup-can poster skips. He took wire-service photographs of wrecks and riots and a tuna can that had killed people and repeated them until the horror became a pattern, which is what a newspaper already does. Brillo boxes, stacked like a stockroom. Cow wallpaper. Flowers, stolen from a magazine photograph and made into a room. He was not decorating. He was showing a country its own filing system. The 1964 World’s Fair mural of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men, commissioned for the New York State pavilion and then painted over in silver at the state’s request, is the other early civic object: a wanted list the official fair could not keep on a wall. He said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, and then he spent the rest of his life testing whether that was a joke. The sentence attached itself to him the way “Moon River” attached itself to Hepburn: useful, true enough, and not the whole file. He meant the television age. He also meant himself. The wig, the blank affect, the tape recorder he carried so he would not have to remember, the Polaroid Big Shot that turned every dinner into a sitting — these were tools. They were also armor. Friends describe a man who went to Mass and called his mother every day. Julia lived with him on Lexington Avenue for years, drew angels, and kept a kitchen in a house the Factory people treated as a myth. The pew was not a performance. The wig was.
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas walked into the Union Square Factory. She had appeared in his film I, a Man. She had written the SCUM Manifesto. She had asked him to produce a script. She shot him. The bullets went through the stomach, the liver, the lungs, the esophagus. Mario Amaya, a visiting curator, was hit as well. Solanas turned herself in. Warhol was given last rites at Columbus Hospital, survived, and wore a surgical corset for the rest of his life. The body did not forget. The Factory, which had been a circus, became a more guarded office. He moved the work toward commissions, toward the rich, toward a magazine that would let him stay in the room without standing in the line of fire.
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.Warhol
The turn is the shooting, and it is easy to file as a legend. A complete life has to hold the commercial years, the soup cans, the Factory as a payroll, and a man who went back to work with a body that would never again be only a pose. He did not become a martyr. He became a businessman who still went out at night as if the night could prove he was still here.
Six things most people never knew
- He was Andrew Warhola Jr. The last letter of the family name was a business decision. Pittsburgh and a Rusyn kitchen are the first rooms.
- The soup cans were a commercial artist’s revenge. He had spent years making other people’s products look desirable. Then he made the product the painting.
- The Factory was a place of work. Silkscreens, films, a payroll. The party was the advertising.
- The Velvet Underground record is a Warhol object. He produced it. The banana is his. The band did the rest.
- The 1968 shooting never left the body. Friends and doctors tied the 1987 death, after a routine gallbladder operation, to damage that had never fully healed.
- He went to church. Byzantine Catholic, regularly, without making it a performance. The wig was public. The pew was not.
Paul and John Warhola have had to share a brother the market turned into a price. Friends from the commercial years describe a punctual illustrator. Friends from the Factory describe a watcher who let other people talk into the tape. Both are the life. Julia died in 1972. He did not perform the grief for the columns. He kept the Mass. He kept the work.
The later years
The years after the shooting were commissions, Interview, dinners, and a quieter studio that still knew how to make a surface. He and John Wilcock launched Interview in 1969, a magazine that treated celebrities as if they were soup cans with better names and then became, itself, a room people wanted to be seen in. He published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) in 1975, a book that is a performance of blankness and, if you read it as a clerk’s ledger, a set of instructions for surviving fame. POPism, with Pat Hackett, reconstructed the 1960s he had already turned into product. He kept diaries. He kept receipts. The art of the 1970s is often filed as society portraiture because society paid: Shahs, singers, wives of men who had bought the 1960s canvases. A society portrait is a soup can with a better name. He knew that. He did not pretend otherwise.
He made television because television was the medium he had already prophesied. Andy Warhol’s TV on Manhattan cable, then Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes on MTV, put the blank affect into a box people already had in the living room. He modeled. He went to Studio 54 and then to whatever room replaced it. In the 1980s he worked with Jean-Michel Basquiat — a collaboration that looked like a passing of the downtown crown and was, in the pictures, two men trying to use each other’s heat. The joint canvases of 1984 and 1985 are arguments in paint. He also worked with Francesco Clemente. He made Myths and Endangered Species and a Last Supper series that returned the Byzantine kitchen to the wall. He was, in those years, both a relic the new downtown needed and a shop that still opened on time.
He kept, through those years, the daily Mass and the daily diary. Pat Hackett typed the diaries into a book that came out after he was gone: a ledger of dinners, cab fares, who was kind, who was using him, who he was using. It is the least blank of his surfaces. Readers who wanted the wig to be the whole man had to sit with a clerk who counted every night. That, too, is the work. The last studio, on East Thirty-third Street, was a more ordinary office than the silver loft had been. Assistants still pulled screens. He still went out. He still took the Big Shot Polaroid to dinner and made a sitting out of a salad. In 1985 and 1986 the Last Supper paintings, after Leonardo, brought the Byzantine kitchen back onto the wall in a way the soup cans had only hinted at: repetition as devotion, devotion as product, a church he had never actually left. He showed in Milan, across from the real fresco. He was, in those months, both a relic the new downtown needed and a believer who had never made the pew a performance. On February 20, 1987, he was admitted to New York Hospital for a gallbladder operation that was described as routine. The shooting had left adhesions; the gallbladder had been a problem for years; he had delayed. The surgery appeared to go well. In the early hours of February 22 he died of a sudden postoperative arrhythmia. He was fifty-eight. The funeral was at Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, among the people who had known Andrew. The memorial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, on April 1, was a crowd that looked like one of his parties, dressed for church. Yoko Ono spoke. The Factory people sat where the Factory people sit. The priest did the rest.
The Foundation, written into the will, was instructed to advance the visual arts. The Museum, in a former warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Shore, opened in 1994 and took the time capsules — hundreds of dated boxes he had filled with mail, toys, bills, a pizza, the ordinary trash of a man who refused to throw the century away. Students walk through the soup cans and the electric chairs and the wigs and argue. That is the point. He had already, in 1962, written the public man. The nineteen years after Solanas were the life he actually got. The market would do the rest. What the wig cannot hold is the count underneath: a sickbed in Pittsburgh, a shoe ad, thirty-two flavors, a dead movie star repeated until she became a product, a banana, a bullet, a magazine, a Mass, and a hospital that had called the operation routine. He had already, in 1962, written the public man. The nineteen years after Solanas were the life he actually got. The market would do the rest.
After he was gone
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh keep the archive. The market did what the market does: Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold for $195 million at Christie’s in May 2022. Students still argue whether he emptied art or told the truth about a country that already had. Interview went on. The Factory is a word people use for any loft with a camera.
He did not have the longest life in American art. He had the one that taught a century to look at a supermarket shelf as if it were a chapel. That is the arc. That is the story. The wig will last. The boy in the Pittsburgh sickbed is the part the wig was built to hide.
Portrait: Jack Mitchell · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons