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Andy Warhol Β Β© Warhol was an US painter, film-maker and author, and a leading figure in the Pop Art movement.

Andrew Warhola was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents had emigrated to the USA from Ruthenia, a region now in the Slovak Republic.

Between 1945 and 1949 Warhol studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1949, he moved to New York and changed his name to Warhol. He worked as a commercial artist for magazines and also designed advertising and window displays.

In the early 1960s, he began to experiment with reproductions based on advertisements, newspaper headlines and other mass-produced images from American popular culture such as Campbell's soup tins and Coca Cola bottles. In 1962, he began his series portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Other subjects given similar treatment included Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley. The same year he took part in the New Realists exhibition in New York, which was the first important survey of Pop Art.

In 1963, Warhol began to make experimental films. His studio, known as the Factory, became a meeting point for young artists, actors, musicians and hangers-on. One of these, Valerie Solanas, shot and seriously wounded him in 1968.

Warhol was now established as an internationally famous artist and throughout the 1970s and 1980s exhibited his work around the world.

On 22 February 1987, Warhol died unexpectedly in a New York hospital following a gall bladder operation.