The World Of Andy Warhol

"Who or why or what is Andy Warhol?" demanded Auberon Waugh.

Warhol obscured his childhood with lies or myths from the moment he received public attention.

He was born in Pittsburgh in August 1928, the third son of Ondrej Warhola and his wife, Julia Zavacky. His parents had emigrated to America from the Carpathian Mountains in Central Europe. His father had a steady job laying roads, he saved money and was ambitious to get his family out of the slums.

The family were devout Byzantine Catholics, who spoke their native tongue at home and socialised with their own people. At the time of Andy's birth his mother could not speak English.

The young Andy attended Holmes Elementary School, but when he was eight caught rheumatic fever which developed into chorea (or St Vitus Dance). He was bullied at school before the condition was diagnosed and then nursed at home by his mother, who gave him magazines to cut up for pictures.

From the age of nine, he went to Saturday morning art classes at the Carnegie Museum. In 1945, on graduating from high school, he went to study art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Here he learnt from the Bauhaus technique that art was a business. He later based his New York studio, known as the Factory, on such principles.

As a youth he suffered badly from acne and had linguistic problems stemming from his home environment. At college his fellow students thought he had "a childlike duality about him". No one then considered that he might be homosexual.

In 1948, whilst still at college, he got a job in the display department of a department store. He painted his fingernails a different colour every day and began to dye his shoes odd colours.

He moved to New York in 1949 and got work as a commercial artist. His portfolio fitted perfectly into the magazine world. In 1953, he won an award for his advertisement for the radio programme the Nation's Nightmare.

In 1952, his mother moved to New York to live with him.

By 1953, he was beginning to go bald so bought himself a wig, the first of hundreds. "Nobody could ever send him up," said one friend; "he had already done so himself."

His Soup Cans exhibition in Los Angeles did not attract much serious interest, but repetition had become important to him in his work and he found that by developing silk screen techniques he could reproduce images more easily. His Marilyn Monroe (1962) was inspired by her death.

By 1963, drugs began to have their influence on the Factory's output. Warhol turned it into a film studio. His reputation increased with the series of underground films he made, which were remarkable for their length (some lasted for 25 hours), their lack of action and their voyeurism. He always used his friends in his films and rarely paid them.

The art critic Robert Hughes described Warhol's entourage in this way: "they were all cultural space-debris ... they gave him a ghostly aura of power". He did appear to wield some sort of charismatic power over his followers. In 1968, one of them, Valerie Solanas, shot Warhol three times. He nearly died.

The 70s saw him attracting socialites such as Margaret Trudeau and pop idols like Mick and Bianca Jagger. He inspired David Bowie and Glitter Rock and was respected by the 70s Rock world. He was feted at the House of Commons at a reception hosted by Norman St John Stevas and, in 1976, was commissioned to paint Jimmy Carter's portrait. He had become a cult figure for the jet-set society.

In 1980 he published a book, Popism, on which the Observer commented: "Warhol is welcome to his fond mortuary reflections".

Warhol died in February 1987 and was buried next to his parents.

A Closer Look At The Campbell's Soup Cans

When Andy Warhol started painting Campbell's soup cans in 1962, the company sent lawyers along to investigate. Little did they know, then, what an effect the paintings would have on their sales, as a new movement in art, Pop Art, was born; and all the experts could do was watch with bemusement and astonishment, as Andy signed soup cans and sold them as souvenirs.

For the early paintings Andy used the red and white of the original cans - but later he incorporated a wide variety of arbitrary colours.

In July 1992, Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed a series of the Soup Can paintings together for the first time, an exhibition that was to herald the arrival of Pop Art to the west coast. Until that time a few of the paintings had been scattered around various New York galleries - but there had been no formal exhibition in New York. This followed later that year at the Stable Gallery.

In 1997, the Campbell Soup Company, who had by now acknowledged the importance of the paintings, sponsored the 'Art of Soup' contest, which marked the 100th birthday of Campbell's soup and the 35th anniversary of Warhol's homage to it. The winning design was a sheet of commemorative postage stamps, each one depicting a different flavour of Campbell's soup submitted by New Jersey man, Dino Sistilli. He was presented with a cheque for $10,000 at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

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