Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is best known for creating are using the image of the Campbell's Soup can. Born in Pittsburgh in 1928, Warhol spent his career as an artist working with pop art, a more modern genre that fit in with the sort of stuff coming into the United States through the British Invasion. The image of a Campbell's Soup can was transformed from mundane to eye-catching. The idea was a sort of commentary on the mass production of the 60's. Warhol also created pop art with the image of himself and celebrities such as Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie Kennedy. A quote from American Visions by Robert Hughes sums Warhol up perfectly: "...in a culture glutted with information, when most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by repeated again and again and again, there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to. He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity- the famous image of a person, the famous brand name- had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity."