Warhol pushed the business of art to new extremes, blurring the line between culture and commerce.

Cover photo: Campbell’s Soup Cans, synthetic polymer paint on ten canvases, 1962, by Andy Warhol, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany (2017). Photo by DannyWithLove.

WARNING: The following article mentions assassination, execution, and contains sexually explicit images.

Yesterday was the birthday of late American artist, Andy Warhol. Born August 6th, Warhol would have been 93 years old. He was born Andrew Warhola, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Rusyn immigrants from modern-day Slovakia.

Warhol moved to New York City in 1949 to pursue a career as a commercial illustrator. He was relentless, approaching magazine editors, museums staffers, and cold-calling art directors.

He gained attention for his images of Campbell’s soup cans. Warhol’s art came to reflect pop culture, celebrity, and consumerism. He became synonymous with the pop art movement, producing silkscreen prints at an industrial scale in his studio and warehouse, named The Factory.

Equal parts artist, celebrity, and self-promoter, Warhol also worked in film, photography, music, and writing. He created the iconic album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico and co-founded Interview Magazine, for which Warhol hired fledgling photographer David LaChappelle. Proximity to Warhol raised the profile of artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

One of the few out gay men living before the time of queer liberation, Warhol was unafraid of creating homoerotic work — though this was often kept private — and tackling other taboo subjects such as the death sentence. In a circa 1980s interview, he remarked, “I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I’m not a social critic.”

Warhol survived an assassination attempt in 1968 and, following complications from gallbladder surgery, he died in 1987. Today Warhol's legacy of embracing art as business lives on in artists such as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami.