Andy Warhol's Pittsburgh

Andrew Warhola was born in Pittsburgh in nineteen twenty-eight, the son of Ruthenian immigrants who had come from what is now Slovakia. His father worked in construction and in the coal mines. The family lived in a row house in the Oakland neighborhood, and then later moved to South Oakland, which in those years was a dense working-class neighborhood of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, their churches and their groceries and their social clubs.

When Andrew was eight, he contracted a nerve disorder called Sydenham's chorea, which confined him to bed for extended periods. His mother gave him coloring books. He began collecting photographs of movie stars from movie magazines, pasting them to his bedroom wall. He started attending free Saturday art classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where he studied reproductions of European masterworks. The museum that Andrew Carnegie built to improve Pittsburgh's cultural life gave this boy something to look at.

He graduated from Carnegie Tech in nineteen forty-nine with a degree in pictorial design and moved to New York almost immediately. He dropped the final letter of his surname and became Andy Warhol. Within a decade he was the most recognizable commercial illustrator in Manhattan. Within two decades he was the most famous American artist alive.

Pop art, the movement Warhol helped define and then came to personify, took the visual language of mass consumption and turned it into fine art. Soup cans, Brillo boxes, silk-screened celebrity photographs. His argument was that the boundary between advertising and art was arbitrary, and that the factory production of images was as valid as the individual brushstroke.

He never forgot Pittsburgh. The Andy Warhol Museum, which opened here in nineteen ninety-four, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. It holds nine hundred paintings and four thousand photographs.