Andy Warhol (born August 6, 1928, , , U.S.—died February 22, 1987, , New York) was an American artist and filmmaker, an initiator and leading exponent of the movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the . An adroit self-publicist, he projected a concept of the artist as an impersonal, even vacuous, figure who is nevertheless a successful celebrity, businessman, and social climber.The son of Ruthenian (Rusyn) immigrants from what is now eastern , Warhol graduated in 1949 from the (now Carnegie Mellon University), Pittsburgh, with a degree in pictorial design. He then went to , where he worked as a commercial illustrator for about a decade.Andy Warhol: Campbell's Soup CansCampbell's Soup Cans, polymer paint on canvas by Andy Warhol, 1962; a selection of five on display in the Museumsquartier, Vienna.(more)Warhol began in the late 1950s and received sudden notoriety in 1962, when he exhibited paintings of , Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes. By 1963 he was mass-producing these purposely banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic prints, and he then began endless variations of portraits of celebrities in garish colours. The silkscreen technique was ideally suited to Warhol, for the repeated image was reduced to an insipid and dehumanized cultural icon that reflected both the supposed emptiness of American , awash in and , and the artist’s emotional noninvolvement with the practice of his art. Warhol’s work placed him in the forefront of the emerging Pop art movement in America., Born and raised in Pittsburgh in a family of Rusyn immigrants, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s. After exhibiting his work in art galleries, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist in the 1960s., Andy Warhol was one of the most prolific and popular artists of his time, using both avant-garde and highly commercial sensibilities..