Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art goings-on known as pop art. His works scrutinize the link between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works tally the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia goings-on known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol initially pursued a thriving career as a classified ad illustrator. After exhibiting his function in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and rich patrons. He promoted a heap of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is certified with inspiring the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame". In the late 1960s he managed and produced the experimental stone band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. He authored numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. In June 1968, he was roughly killed by advocate feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot him inside his studio. After gallbladder surgery, Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58 in New York.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive unshakable collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. A 2009 article in The Economist described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market". Many of his creations are extremely collectible and deeply valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is $105 million for a 1963 serigraph titled Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster). His works attach some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.