Andy Warhol: Commercial Art Icon

Andy Warhol, born as Andy Warhola, is known today as one of the greatest commercial artists. The artist began his training at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he studied graphic design. There he developed a unique "blotted-line" technique. After graduating in 1949, he moved with a classmate to an apartment in New York. He started producing designs and illustrations for business advertisements.

His first project was illustrating for Glamour. In his early years, he worked for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Seventeen, McCall's, Tiffany & Co., CBS, NBC, and the I. Miller Shoe Company. His work with the I. Miller Shoe Company was the thing that originally launched his career and got him noticed.

Through the 1960's, he continued his commercial work into the world of popular culture. He took other works of arts and added his own touch; he worked with images of comic strips, for example. He focused in consumer society, recreating mass produced items such as Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and Brillo boxes.

He valued quantity over quality, saying that "repetition adds up to reputation". He also once said, "I think everybody should be a machine". These statements explain his love of recreating the mass produced items and famous people of a "bigger is better" society. He created pictures of people in the spotlight over and over, putting the pictures together in a collage or adding different colors each time.

Warhol had been fascinated with the world of movie stars since he was a child. He commercialized simple pictures of celebrities and added color or warped them. He mainly used silk-screen printing or canvas for these works. Some of his famous pieces include: Marilyn, Triple Elvis, and Liz. There were many, many more works he created of people considered symbols of the time.