The famous pop culture artist, Andy Warhol, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. During his college years he attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology and majored in pictorial design. After Warhol graduated he moved to New York and got a job as a commercial artist drawing illustrations for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker. In addition to painting, Warhol made 16mm films like Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job, which have become underground classics. Warhol is considered to be a founder and major figure in the pop art movement. .
As a pop culture artist, Warhol thrived throughout the 50's and 60's when pop culture was just beginning to emerge into American society. Pop art was a response to what was happening during the rise of manufacturing and based off a culture that was commercially driven. Warhol's art played off of consumerism and mass marketing. Images of movie stars flooded the media and American society craved more. Warhol noticed this state of mind that Americans were in while being overloaded with famous .
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images and through his art he mimicked the condition of mass advertising. Warhol was one of the first artists to understand the importance of mass media. He .
concentrated on subjects of mass consumption and culture by isolating and monumentalizing them, without using other objects in the background and without preliminary sketches. Warhol used a projector to put them on canvas. He made it plain and simple and therefore was able to create the icons of Pop Art. For Andy Warhol, the most influential of the Pop artists, the direct application of pigment to canvas was outmoded and limiting. Early in his career, he began to utilize the silkscreen process to transfer photographed images to canvas. Warhol used this process throughout the 1960's to reproduce multiple portraits of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Jacqueline Kennedy.
