His father was a laborer whose death when Warhol was 14 so traumatized him that he hid under his bed instead of attending the funeral. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Copyright © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Image Credit: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. So, while his biographical details are concrete enough, Warhol remains a cipher. (“I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up” is how he put it.) But his cosplaying also constituted a sort of hiding in plain sight.

Warhol’s adopted persona as a bewigged enigma could be construed, perhaps, as both a reenactment of the social transformations noted above and a shrewd strategy. He likewise anticipated the disposable nature of our social media–addled present (“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”) and the triumph of money as the final arbiter of quality (“Business is the best art”). In other words, he foresaw our current neoliberal order. (He once said of Coca-Cola, “A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”) He also connected the centrifugal dynamic of this new egalitarianism to late capitalism, recognizing how both destabilized conventional hierarchies of wealth and status. Consciously or not, in his work he intuited how these changes reflected the displacement of high art by the divertissements of comic books, movies, television, and advertising. Warhol came of age just as the WASP elite that had held the country in its grip since the days of the founders was being pushed aside for a meritocracy led primarily by the offspring of formerly marginalized ethnic groups from southern and eastern Europe-people, in other words, like him.

Warhol was a prime mover of Pop Art, and though he didn’t invent the genre, he possessed a unique insight into its implications, due partly to his own story. But near the top of this list is a first-generation American born in Pittsburgh to a blue-collar family of Eastern Slavic immigrants: Andrew Warhola, aka Andy Warhol (1928–1987). The number of artists who are household names is vanishingly small.

Andy warhol