Today In History

Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, his original name was Andrew Warhola. After high school he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and then in 1949 went to New York where he worked as an illustrator for magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. He soon became one of New York's most successful commercial illustrators. In 1952 Andy Warhol had his first one-man show exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in New York, and in 1956 he had an important group exhibition at the renowned Museum of Modern Art. In the sixties when he became a famous figure in the New York art scene he was painting daily objects of mass production like Campbell Soup cans and Coke bottles. He then started making silkscreen prints of famous personalities like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Andy Warhol removed the difference between fine arts and the commercial arts used for magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums and advertising campaigns. He once expressed his philosophy in one poignant sentence: