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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.
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