Andy Warhol: the American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and film maker

Andy Warhol, the American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and film maker was born in Pittsburgh on August 6, 1928, shortly afterwards settling in New York. The only son of immigrant, Czech parents, Andy finished high school and went on to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, graduating in 1949 with hopes of becoming an art teacher in the public schools. While in Pittsburgh, he worked for a department store arranging window displays, and often was asked to simply …

…for these paintings were gruesome, though he showed again his brilliant eye for such images so effective in shocking the viewer. "With an eye for the eccentricity of an individual event, Warhol's paintings capture the unpredictable choreography of death." Using a broad range of images, from car crashes, suicides, burn victims, funerals, riots, to the culmination with the atomic bomb, Warhol succeeded in giving the viewer what one expected of Warhol; to expect the unexpected.