Andy Warhol

Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh to immigrant parents from what is now Slovakia, Warhol took a BFA in Pictorial Design from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 and spent the 1950s as one of New York’s most successful commercial illustrators, with clients including Tiffany & Co., The New York Times, Columbia Records and NBC. He turned that commercial fluency into fine art in the early 1960s — the 1962 Campbell’s Soup Cans made him famous — and from 1963 built a practice on commissioned portraits, films and magazine publishing. The line about business being the best art is not a stray provocation; it is the thesis of a career that refused to treat commerce and art as opposites.