Private Collection, United Kingdom
Biography:
Warhol studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, from 1945 to 1949.
He moved to New York in 1949 and worked as a commercial artist.
Warhol held his first one-man exhibition of drawings at the Hugo Gallery, New York, in 1952, and
published six books of reproductions of his own drawings 1954-9. He was awarded the Art Directors’
Club Medal for his shoe advertisements 1957.
A leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art, his works explore the relationship between
artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. It was during this
time that Warhol began to make paintings based on newspaper title pages, advertisements and other
mass-produced images, and from 1962 to use silkscreen for the largely mechanical production by
himself and assistants of series of easel paintings of ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’, ‘Coca-Cola Bottles’,
portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, and later also car crashes,
the electric chair, flowers and so on, sometimes with rows of repeated images.
