The Unbearable Lightness of Being1

’d prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my “I background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I’m asked, ” Andy Warhol said. “It’s not just that it’s part of my image not to tell anything, it’s just that I forget what I said the day before, and I have to make it all up over again. ” The man described as “a serious artist whose posture was unseriousness ” called himself “a deeply superficial person.” He frustrated those who wanted to know more about him: “Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Though he claimed to “come from nowhere, ” he was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Czech immigrant parents. He lost his father early and grew up in a modest household during the Depression, shy and frail and plagued by childhood diseases, among them Sydenham chorea, a movement disorder that occurs with rheumatic fever, which interfered with his early formal education. As he lay bedridden for months, he listened to the radio; discovered magazines, which he read avidly; and started to draw, entering his artistic career in tune with the popular culture of his generation. His talent was recognized early. He attended the then Carnegie Institute of Technology in his hometown, to study pictorial design and soon moved to New York to work as commercial illustrator. His first assignment for Glamour magazine was titled “Success Is a Job in New York.” He found such success quickly with other magazines. He designed window displays for major retailers and promotional materials for record labels. Much of this work, which received many accolades, relied on photographs and other existing images, a process he would continue to use throughout his life. The 1960s saw Warhol’s debut in the fine arts, his Pop paintings, depicting celebrities, dollar bills, and supermarket products. Pop Art, a movement of the 1950s and 1960s, trampled tradition by embracing mass-produced elements