Life and legacy of Andy Warhol

Most of the world’s top contemporary art collections will undoubtedly house an Andy Warhol almost as a rite of passage. As a top-selling, blue-chip artist, his work is unmissable when recounting 20th-century art. This has been continuously proven over the last decade, with him topping the global auction charts with a $590 million USD in hammer‐price turnover in 2022, making him the world’s best‐selling artist that year. Approximately 2,100 Warhol works were also sold at auction in 2022, up from roughly 200 per year a decade earlier, underscoring both his prolific output and extraordinary liquidity. These 2022 figures far exceed the $380.3 million Warhol achieved in 2012, and push his cumulative auction total past the $2.9 billion mark by 2012, cementing his role as the true bellwether of the post-war art market.

Charting his legacy

The artist was born as Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), graduating in 1949, and then moved to New York City. In his initial years, Warhol gained acclaim as a commercial illustrator, producing whimsical ink drawings, magazine covers, and advertising art for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and department stores.

Warhol’s artistic breakthrough materialised in mid-1962 with his first solo exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which opened on July 9, 1962. Here's how it unfolded:

• Concept and Context: Warhol had been experimenting with elevating everyday commercial imagery into fine art. By painting 32 nearly identical 20×16″ canvases, each bearing the label of a different variety of Campbell’s Soup, he both celebrated and critiqued America’s burgeoning consumer culture.
• The Ferus Gallery Show (July 1962): Although Warhol began painting the canvases in 1961, the exhibition officially opened in July 1962. Unlike traditional gallery installations, Warhol arranged the paintings in a single row around the room, mimicking how grocery shelves display products.
• Immediate Impact: Many abstract-expressionist stalwarts scoffed at the flat, commercial subject matter. But the art press couldn’t ignore it. Critics recognised that Warhol had radically upended what “fine art” could look like. The sheer audacity of treating a supermarket staple as high art made headlines.
• Aftermath: Virtually overnight, Warhol became the face and lightning rod of what came to be known as Pop Art. Dealers, collectors, and galleries clamoured to show and buy his work, and major museums began acquiring his pieces. Within a year, he was exhibiting in New York’s Stable and Castelli galleries and was firmly installed at the vanguard of the new movement.

The Museum of Modern Art describes the soup cans as “made during the moment when Warhol was trying to transform himself from a commercial artist to a fine artist, right before he became a beacon of Pop Art in the 1960s.” In 1996, MoMA acquired all 32 original paintings, which Ferus Gallery director Irving Blum had preserved as a complete set.

Mickey Mouse (FS II.265), 1981, available to purchase

Warhol across the decades

The Marilyn Diptych (1962) was produced just weeks after Monroe’s death. Warhol’s work played with the idea of iconography, the glorification of celebrities and consumer culture, using Monroe’s image, which was ubiquitous in magazines and newspapers at the time. While a variant of the diptych was acquired by Tate in 1980, another variant, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold for a record  $195 million at Christie’s New York in May 2022, underscoring the continued demand for Warhol’s silkscreen masterpieces.

Warhol was enamoured by the uncanny uniformity that the silkscreen brought. It mirrored mass production and “erased” his hand, emphasising the American consumer culture. He made silkscreen works with Jackie Kennedy, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor arranging multiple identically silk-screened portraits in grid formats, shifting colour or scale to emphasise their iconography. The auction record for a Warhol Liz painting currently stands at $23.7 million (2007), with another coloured Liz title fetching $19.34 million at Christie’s in 2019, demonstrating significant collector interest.

Today, collectors continue to prize Warhol’s trial proofs and colour‑variant silkscreens, which, being unique, occupy a special niche in the market. His print edition of 150, Cow (F. & S. II.12), made in 1971 is currently available to purchase on Artscapy at £28,000. Rated for its high investability and liquidity as well as low risk, over the years, the market has proven time and again that a Warhol is always a good choice. Fifty-plus years on, Warhol’s silkscreen remains synonymous with Pop Art’s challenge to authorship, craft, and consumer spectacle and each high-profile sale reminds the market that the marriage of process and icon can still break new ground in value.