Andy
Warhol was born in 1930 in the coal-mining town of McKeesport,
Pennsylvania, USA. His parents were Czech immigrants.
When his father, a miner, died in a mining accident Andy
was forced to support his family through odd jobs. He
worked his way through Carnegie Tech., Pittsburgh where
he studied commercial art. While in Pittsburgh, Warhol
got to know the painter Philip Pearlstein, who was studying
under Lepper at the time. In 1952 when Warhol graduated
he moved to New York where he launched a successful career
as an illustrator.
Warhol began producing Pop pictures in 1960 with works
based on Popeye, Nancy and Dick Tracy comics. These early
works were first shown as backdrops for department store
windows and were painted in a loosely brushed style based
on Abstract Expressionism. Warhol's first works using
comic material tended to soften hard professional gestures
and aggressive vocabulary of the texts and images. By
contrast, Lichtenstein's work (neither of the artists
had heard of the other at this stage) strained the harsh
language of the comic strip to its utmost limits of perfection
and artificiality. Warhol countered the scrupulous accuracy
of the original genre with imprecision and deliberate
error. In doing so, he soiled the comic strips narrow-minded
ideological and decorative purity.
