Andy Warhol American, 1928-1987

Career

Warhol's early career was dedicated to commercial and advertising art, where his first commission had been to draw shoes for Glamour magazine in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, Warhol worked as a designer for the shoe manufacturer Israel Miller and eventually showcased his early sketches at the Bodley Gallery in New York. Warhol was an early adopter of the silk screen printmaking process as a technique for making paintings. While working in the shoe industry, Warhol developed his "blotted line" technique, applying ink to paper and then blotting the ink while still wet, which was akin to a printmaking process on the most rudimentary scale. His use of tracing paper and ink allowed him to repeat the basic image and also to create endless variations on the theme, a method that prefigures his 1960s silk-screen canvas. 
 
By the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American objects such as dollar bills, mushroom clouds, electric chairs, Campbell's Soup Cans, Coca-Cola bottles, celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as newspaper headlines or photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. During these years, he alaso founded his studio, "The Factory" and gathered a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities in his posse.