Andy Warhol

Pittsburgh, then the shoes

Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York. Through the 1950s he was, as the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh puts it, 'one of the most successful illustrators of his time', with clients including Tiffany & Co., The New York Times and Columbia Records — a decade of paid drawing that later fed straight into the art.

In 1962 he exhibited a series of paintings of Campbell's Soup Cans, and the reaction made him famous almost immediately. He moved to silkscreen — a commercial printing process in which ink is pushed through a stencilled mesh, so the same image can be put down again and again, with the registration, the alignment of one colour layer over the next, slipping from print to print — and used it on the film star Marilyn Monroe, the singer Elvis Presley, electric chairs, car crashes and dollar signs. In 1963 he started making films, among them Sleep (1963), Empire (1964) and The Chelsea Girls (1966), and his studio, the Factory, became the address for a shifting cast of people who appeared in them.

Paris, May 1965: the retirement

Warhol's first Flowers paintings — a photograph of four hibiscus blooms, cropped square and repeated in flat colour — were shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in November 1964, the dealership that represented most of the American Pop artists. In May 1965 a second, larger set went on show in Paris at the gallery of Ileana Sonnabend, the dealer whose Paris rooms had spent the early 1960s introducing American Pop art to European collectors — Robert Rauschenberg, who glued newsprint and stuffed animals into his paintings; Jasper Johns, who painted flags and targets; and Warhol.

Warhol crossed the Atlantic for it, and while in Paris announced that he was retiring from painting to concentrate on film. He told it as a decision already taken. It did not hold — he was silkscreening again within a couple of years, and after 1972 he painted commissioned portraits at industrial volume — but the announcement was made in Paris, to the French press, at the show that a French gallery had put on, and it reads now as the moment he formally attached himself to cinema.

On 3 June 1968 Valerie Solanas, a writer who had appeared in his film I, a Man, shot him in the chest at the Factory. He barely survived, and the studio afterwards was a tighter, more corporate operation than the open house it had been. In the year of his recovery he co-founded Interview, a magazine about film, fashion and celebrity that still exists.

The Paris he kept coming back to

In 1968 Warhol met Yves Saint Laurent and the couturier's partner Pierre Bergé, and the three became friends; the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, the museum in Saint Laurent's old workrooms at 5 avenue Marceau, records that Warhol considered him 'the most important French artist'. In 1972 Warhol made a series of portraits of Saint Laurent by the standard Warhol procedure of that decade: he took an instant Polaroid photograph of the sitter, had it enlarged and traced, printed the outline onto canvas by silkscreen, and painted the colour in by hand. In 1986 he painted Saint Laurent's French bulldog, Moujik, whose image later turned up on greeting cards.

He was in the city often through the 1970s, shot the film L'Amour (1972) around it, and kept an apartment on the Left Bank, on the rue du Cherche-Midi in the 6th arrondissement, shared with his business manager Fred Hughes. The circle he moved in was the fashion one: Saint Laurent; Karl Lagerfeld, the German designer who was Saint Laurent's rival and later ran Chanel; Loulou de la Falaise, t[2]he Anglo-French designer of Saint Laurent's jewellery and his closest working companion; and Paloma Picasso, the painter Pablo Picasso's daughter, herself a jewellery designer — the Paris that the journalist Alicia Drake's history of the decade reconstructs, and that Warhol's own dictated diaries log from the inside, dinner by dinner.

Basquiat, Haring, and the last years

By the mid-1980s Warhol had attached himself to artists thirty years younger. He and Jean-Michel Basquiat — the young Brooklyn-born painter who had come out of New York street graffiti and was, by then, one of the most sought-after artists in the world — painted together from 1984 — the Andy Warhol Museum counts 'over 150 collaborative canvases over a four-year period' — with Warhol laying down logos and headlines by hand and Basquiat painting across them. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York hung the results in its 2018 retrospective, among them Paramount (1984–85) and Third Eye (1985).[3]

Keith Haring, the other young artist he worked with — the New Yorker whose chalk drawings of barking dogs and radiant babies covered the city's subway advertising panels — named Warhol's 'unique fusion of art and life' as the thing that decided him on making public art, and counted him among the friends and mentors who backed the Pop Shop, the store Haring opened to sell T-shirts, badges and posters of his own images cheaply, when the art world sneered at it as a sell-out.

Warhol died in New York on 22 February 1987 of complications after surgery to remove his gall bladder. He was fifty-eight. Basquiat, who had been as close to him as to anyone alive until their joint exhibition of 1985 was mocked by the critics and the friendship cooled, was badly shaken by the death and died of a heroin overdose eighteen months later, aged twenty-seven.