Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American artist, a leading figure of the Pop Art movement. ​Using a variety of media materials from photographs up to computer-generated art, Warhol's works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity, culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s.
Emerging from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, Warhol became a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York. In 1960, he began to produce his first canvases depicting Popeye and Dick Tracy. After Marilyn Monroe’s death in August 1962, he started working from snapshots of the star’s already legendary face, which had been widely distributed by the world’s press. His choice of subjects clearly relates to an obsession with demise – his Marilyns, his Ten Lizies (created when the actress Elizabeth Taylor was seriously ill), and also his Elvis. Part of the “Death and Disaster” series, Andy Warhol´s Marilyn Monroes are undoubtedly iconic portraits of our era, exploring as they do the artist’s fascination for images of death and beauty. He worked across many media as a painter, printmaker, illustrator, film-maker, and writer, and produced many world-famous series. Andy Warhol Flower´s series reinterprets a traditional motif spanning the history of art, while Warhol´s Cambell´s Soup Can series represents the mass-produced, printed advertisements that inspired him since his childhood. Towards the end of 1962, the artist turned to the photo-silkscreen process, which became his signature medium. From 1963 up until 1968, the year in which he was shot, Warhol – surrounded by assistants in his studio The Factory – took the industrial character of his work to its climax. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions and books, as well as feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Andy Warhol´s artworks are some of the most influential works of art of the second half of the twentieth century, representing the most recognizable images ever produced.

Andy Warhol

Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images.

Of all Andy Warhol's celebrity subjects, none seem more perfectly emblematic of how the artist perceived and synthesised America than Marilyn Monroe. Warhol saw in Monroe all the promise, beauty, sex symbol, a Hollywood product, the fame and tragedy that 1960s America was capable of realizing. In his Marilyn portraits – which he began shortly after Monroe's death, in August 1962 and taking on the suggestion of Henry Geldzahler - it's impossible to locate what one might call the truth of the subject.

Warhol liked watching Hollywood films, saying that the only real reason we watch movies is to see the stars and to see them as often as possible.

His Marilyns are technically incredibly special, as when you look at them the colour of the background pops first and the drawing comes second, a complete reversal of the usual order seen in painting.

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“ I just see Monroe as just another person. As for whether it's symbolical to paint Monroe in such violent colors: it's beauty, and she's beautiful and if something's beautiful it's pretty colors, that's all. „

—Andy Warhol