Andy Warhol was, from the start, concerned about fame, glamour and money, devoid of a philosophy of art – despite his book
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. And yet, it was Warhol, more than any of his contemporaries, who moved art from the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock to pop art, in the process replacing modernism, with postmodernism still playing itself out today.
The arc of Warhol’s life can be easily summarised: He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, the child of Czech immigrants. He was his mother’s favourite, his father being away for extended periods working in coal mines and on construction sites. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, after which he moved to New York, where he became a highly successful commercial artist, producing window displays and adverts for large companies for a decade.