Growing up during the Depression in a working-class immigrant family near Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol spent much of his early life on the outside looking in. The seductive world of consumer goods remained out of his reach as a child, and as an adult he found himself shut out of the fine art world because of his advertising background. Andy’s first published drawing was, appropriately enough, an image of five shoes going up a “ladder of success,” published in the summer 1949 issue of Glamour. By the 1950s, Warhol had established himself as a successful commercial illustrator—a profession that clashed with prevailing notions of what it meant to be a “real” artist. Abstract Expressionism, which was exemplified by hard-drinking macho painters like Jackson Pollock, dominated America’s postwar painting world. Its frenetic, expressive style was celebrated by American and European critics as the authentic, spontaneous eruption of the human spirit—an antidote to the deadening standardization of popular culture that Andy grew up with and admired. If Pollack’s drip paintings communicated a wild emotional intensity, Warhol’s silkscreened prints were deliberately flat and deadpan, the antithesis of the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic.

From Chapter 3 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore