From shoe ads to a Marilyn that sold for $195 million
Andrew Warhola Jr. (1928–1987), son of Rusyn immigrants in Pittsburgh, started out drawing shoes for advertisers. Then Campbell’s Soup, Marilyn and mechanical silkscreens made him the face of pop art, and in 2022 one of his Marilyns became the priciest American artwork ever sold at auction.
At eight, a strep infection turned into scarlet fever and, with no antibiotics available, eventually into Sydenham’s chorea. Long stretches in bed became drawing sessions: he cut pictures from comic books his mother bought and pasted Hollywood magazine images into scrapbooks, while his father and brothers built him a basement darkroom for the family Kodak. His father, a coal miner who had emigrated in 1912, died in 1942.
A scholarship took him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1945, where a series of pen-and-ink sketches of customers from his summer job selling produce won a $40 student prize. He finished a pictorial design degree in 1949 and headed to New York with classmate Philip Pearlstein, building a career as a commercial illustrator before turning to fine art.
The early 1960s silkscreens, among them Campbell’s Soup Can, Marilyn Diptych and Coca-Cola (3), all dated 1962, pulled the look of advertising and celebrity into galleries. Films followed, from Empire in 1965 to Chelsea Girls in 1966, and his studio, the Factory, drew poets, drag queens, musicians and rich patrons; he also managed the Velvet Underground. After he survived an attempt on his life in 1968, the operation turned into a business that launched Interview magazine and produced series such as Mao and Last Supper.
He died of cardiac arrhythmia at 58 after gallbladder surgery in 1987, and his diaries appeared two years later. The market has treated him as a bellwether: Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) made $105 million in 2013, and Shot Sage Blue Marilyn reached $195 million in 2022. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is the largest American museum devoted to one artist.
Source: Andy Warhol
