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Andy Warhol
Andy was born (1928) was a painter, print maker, filmmaker and was a leader of the pop art movement. During the 60s Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans from the Campbell Soup Company and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor.

He switched to silkscreen prints, producing them in series, seeking to make art of mass-produced items and at the same time to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own creative insight in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art - his work quickly became very controversial, and popular. Warhol's work from this time period focused on American Pop Culture. He painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings - many of them were iconic images from headline stories of the decade (e.g. photographs of mushroom clouds, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters). His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal - this aspect interested him most.

The left image is Dollar Bill and was produced in 1981. It was made using synthetic polymer paints and silk-screen inks on canvas. This is reflective of Warhol's love for money. In the early 1960s he depicted one-dollar bills and then in 1981 he returned to the imagery and completed a whole series of drawings and paintings of the dollar sign. This piece is an ironic acknowledgement which illustrates postmodernism in its final stage.

The right image is a piece of Marilyn Monroe, created in 1962. Monroe died in August 1962. In the following four months, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he showed her constant presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.