Andy Warhol

One of the most famous artists of all time, Andy Warhol is the defining painter of the 1960s Pop movement. Well-known and much-loved for his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Coke bottles, Warhol set out on a career in the world of advertising. During the ’60s, he embraced imagery culled from advertising and print media, leading art in a new and different direction. Warhol is most famous for his paintings, but he also produced a variety of films, most notably Empire (1965), an eight-hour-long shot of the Empire State Building.

Warhol himself became a celebrity, attracting many aspiring starlets to his Factory, an amorphous operation that hosted parties and helped Warhol create films. He also helped bring together the Velvet Underground & Nico, who put out a defining 1967 album with Warhol as their producer.

Warhol continued to make art until his death in 1989, following gall bladder surgery, but his work from the 1970s and ’80s isn’t quite so widely known as what he did earlier. Still, in that era, he produced some acclaimed works, including a series in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Recent exhibitions have focused on the role that Warhol’s identity as a gay man may have played in his artwork from this period.

The Andy Warhol Museum opened in 1994, touting tself as one of the largest institutions in the United States dedicated to a single artist. The museum is perhaps the most permanent means of preserving Warhol’s legacy, but there are others, some of them unexpected: In 2023, for one, a US Supreme Court case focused on whether Warhol’s appropriation of photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s 1981 portrait of the musician Prince counted as fair use. The court decided against the Warhol Foundation, a landmark decision that some historians say may cast a long shadow on appropriation art.