Andy Warhol

American painter, film maker and author. Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, originally named Warhola. He studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh. Warhol moved to New York and worked as a commercial artist where he was awarded the Art Directors' Club Medal for his shoe advertisements 1955.

This image provided by the Williams College Museum of Art shows a 1955 hand-coloured lithograph by artist Andy Warhol titled "My shoe is your shoe", part of the exhibit. Warhola becomes Warhol, Andy Warhol: Early Work," at the college through June 10, 2007, in Williamstown, Mass.

First one-man exhibition of drawings at the Hugo Gallery, New York and published six books of reproduction of his own drawings. Interested in American popular art, film stars, etc and in silkscreen and other reproductive processed. In 1960, he began to make paintings based on news paper title pages, advertisments and other mass-produced images, and used silkscreen for the mainly mechanical production by himself and assistants of series of frame paintings of:

'Campbell's Soup Cans', Black Bean - 1968

The show included a set of 32 canvases of Campbell’s “Soup cans” one canvas for each soup variety offered by the manufacturer. Warhol used a semi-mechanized print process to fill the work with an impersonal, mass-produced quality.

Warhol painted familiar consumer items such as coca-cola bottles or soup cans throughout the 1960s, the earliest examples first shown in New York in 1962. Asked why he painted soup cans, Warhol replied, 'Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day.' Using screen printing, Warhol could simulate the mechanical effect of his source until that the resulting image appears almost unchanged. Yet, the rich colour, enlargement of scale and unifying black outline are reminders that these are commercial techniques being used in the context of high art, no longer selling products, but presenting them as objects for observation. As such, they pose radical questions about the value of art and the way it is consumed.

Marilyn Monroe

In Marilyn Monroe, Warhol found a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. The star died tragically in August 1962. In the following two years, Warhol made thirty silkscreen paintings of her, always using the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. This set of ten screen prints was produced in 1967, in an edition of 250. The repeated image serves as the basis for a series of startling colour transformations.

Elvis Presley,Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, 'Coca-Cola Bottles', and later , car crashes, the electric chair, flowers ecc.  Sometimes with rows of repeated images.

The Autumn/Winter 2013 collection  At Paris Fashion Week, in March, Christian Dior showed a stunning collection, with prints of drawings from Andy Warhol’s early career as a fashion illustrator. 

The clothing line is based on , plain , white and black  fabric so that it gives most of the attention to Andy Warhol’s prints . In my opinion the concept of it is brilliant , to turn something formal into something somewhat commercial and trendy , whilst also showcasing a great artist’s works. I probably wouldn’t wear any of  these outfits myself because it’s not my style  , but I wouldn’t mind wearing one on occasion .  

Carol Kopp. 2007. Andy Warhol's Shoe Thing. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/andy-warhols-shoe-thing/. [Accessed 21 May 14].