Andy Warhol

American underground artist and filmmaker who had a genius for creating attention. An androgyne and voyeur himself, his salon became the New York center of the freak scene in the '60s. When the pop-art movement exploded at the end of 1962, his drawings of soup cans and screens of the famous became hot property. He started film making in 1963, hovering in the twilight zone between reality and fantasy. Warhol was the son of a Czech immigrant and he studied art at the Carnegie Institute. He designed ads for women’s shoes before bursting upon the cultural scene in the early ‘60s. On 3 June 1968, he was shot by a demented fan; after his recovery he was somewhat subdued, but still newsworthy in the '80s for his personal outrage of convention and aberrative entourage. Warhol founded "Interview" magazine in the early '70s and remained a pop-culture figure into the ‘80s. Warhol lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. His lovers included John Giorno, Billy Name, Charles Lisanby, and Jon Gould. His boyfriend of 12 years was Jed Johnson, whom he met in 1968, and who later achieved fame as an interior designer. On 21 February 1987 he had a gall bladder operation and died the next morning in Manhattan of a heart attack, at 6:32 a.m. on 22 February 1987. His estate was estimated to be worth $220 million. Warhol's will dictated that his entire estate—with the exception of a few modest legacies to family members—would go to create a foundation dedicated to the "advancement of the visual arts". In 1987, in accordance with Warhol's will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts began. In 1989 the posthumous publication of "The Andy Warhol Diaries" hit the best seller list with their litany of limo’s, dinners, tips, encounters, all the trivia of life among the beautiful – if two dimensional - people. The book contained gossip on almost every star from Warhol’s experience as a party fixture. Link to Wikipedia biography