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Next to "Pop Art" in the encyclopedia, there will most likely lie a color picture of Andy Warhol, complete with his brief, italicized description. The artistic phenomenon paralleled in Britain and the United States, like many of the pop culture materializations of the mid-twentieth century. But none surpassed Warhol as the legendary "Prince of Pop," who famously drew upon themes in popular mass culture to express a reaction to those dominant ideas in abstract expressions. Though fine art talent was evidential to Warhol's artistic bent early on, he intended to remove the schism between fine arts and the commercial arts of print media, rather than pursue his drawing and painting. He received a degree in commercial art from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in his hometown of Pittsburgh, and proceeded to penetrate the commercial market in New York with his illustrations for magazines like Vogue and Harpar's Bazaar.

Perhaps it was his inner city upbringing by Slovak immigrant parents (the Warholas), or perhaps it was the St. Vitus' dance he contracted in the third grade, but Warhol's circles of social interaction and artistic appreciation spanned from the bohemian to the aristocrat. In his book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again, he says, "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorestAll the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." His fascination with popular culture led to an inordinate amount of silkscreen prints depicting everything from Campbell's Soup Cans to Marilyn Monroe.

But Warhol wanted to mass produce his art, thus, "The Factory" was born. Magnetically drawing both underground and popular artists, writers and musicians to his studio, Warhol's eccentricities led to a revolution in art: his own creativity was diminished to manufacture duplicates of his abstract renditions of iconic images. The Factory became the hub for "art workers" to produce both Warhol's prints and their own works of art, as well as an experimental filmmaking studio. Warhol produced over 300 underground films, as unconventional and controversial as his own person. Popularity plagued Warhol in such a way that the controversy nearly coincided with the acceptance. Near the end of his reign of the sixties, a worker named Valerie Solanis shot the pop artist three times in the chest, claiming, "He had too much control over my life."

Still scathed by his narrow escape from death, Warhol's style drastically changed in the seventies. The artist who established mass production of art now poured his time into individual portraits of the rich and affluent. Uniqueness and individuality characterized the man, but in a different way. He became an entrepreneur. He founded the magazine Interview, opened a nightclub and published books. Though he was an extremely public individual, few agree upon his actual personality. Hollywood glamour was his obsession, and Studio 54 and Serendipity 3 were not strange havens to his nights out; but he was regarded as shy, quiet and a true workaholic. After a three decade spell of artistic sway, medical complications took his life. No matter the viewpoint, the artist is a legend as iconic as the depicted images for which he is so renowned. After Andy Warhol's hand touched the field of art, creative expression was never the same.

Learn more about this author, Alizah Grace.
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