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.

Although best known for his silkscreens, Andy Warhol was also an excellent draughtsman and drawing was a constant part of his artistic practice, from his earliest days as an art student in the 1940s to the last few weeks before his death in 1987. His characteristic "blotted line" technique served him well, and often in commercial assignments. Warhol was in such demand for commercial illustration, that in order to avoid turning down projects, he recruited assistants to execute drawings under his direction. This working process would later form the foundation for calling his studio in New York City, the Factory.
For Warhol food was his “great extravagance” and he had a very sweet tooth, claiming that “all I ever really want is sugar”. This image of an extravagant dessert has been depicted in the same way he would complete a fashion illustration - with his blotted-line technique and vivid colors. The dessert was almost certainly from the fashionable Serendipity 3 café where Warhol would host coloring parties in the 1950s. He would encourage his friends – some of whom would have helped him create the original illustrations - to color the works with an inventiveness that adds to their whimsical nature.

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