Although his fellow students at Carnegie recognized the quiet, unusual young artist as an exceptional talent and innovator, the faculty was divided on whether Warhol had the skills to complete his studies. At the end of the term, Warhol was dropped from the school. Warhol spent the summer selling vegetables with his brother. He drew the people he saw, filling a sketchbook with scenes of everyday life. Those drawings would get Warhol reinstated at Carnegie the following autumn.

Many of Carnegie’s instructors came from industrial and commercial art backgrounds. Introducing Warhol to the Bauhaus school, a German art movement based in fusing art and technology, Warhol’s professors set the artist on the path that dominated his future work. Bauhaus’ emphasis on art as business would directly influence Warhol’s development of his Factory studio.

In 1949, Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and traveled to New York to find work. As detailed in Warhol, Tina Fredericks, art editor of the fashion magazine Glamour, bought one of Warhol’s drawings and commissioned him to create a series of shoe drawings. When the work was published, the final “a” was omitted from his name. From that day on, Andy Warhola would be Andy Warhol.

in just four years, Warhol rose from obscurity to become the most sought-after fashion illustrator in New York thanks to his bold yet whimsical style. During this time, he developed the techniques of ink blotting and reproduction that would prefigure his use of silk screening in the 1960s.

As detailed in Pop by Tony Sherman, in 1963, Andy Warhol moved his base of operations from an abandoned firehouse to the fifth floor of 231 East 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan. The cavernous former hat factory would be transformed into Warhol’s wonderland — a citadel for the manufacture of art and a magnet for outsiders, celebrities, drug addicts, and drag queens.

Having marveled at the “silverized” apartment of his friend, hairdresser and self-proclaimed magician Billy Linich, Warhol employed him to give his new studio the same treatment. Covering every surface in silver paint and aluminum foil, Linich transformed the space into a shining art palace that evoked both the space-age future and Hollywood nostalgia. “It was the perfect time for silver,” Warhol wrote. “Silver was the future. It was spacey […] And sliver was also the past — the Silver Screen […] And maybe more than anything else, silver was narcissism — mirrors were backed with silver.”

Warhol’s new studio, the Factory, lived up to its name. With help of hired assistance and hangers-on, the artist produced his silk-screened paintings on a virtual assembly line not unlike the mass-produced products many of them depicted — an irony not lost on Warhol.

The original Factory lasted until 1967, when the building was sold to make way for an apartment complex. Those four years were among the most productive of Warhol’s career, during which the artist would experiment with sculpture and film, expanding pop art from an artistic movement to a personal philosophy and lifestyle.

Aside from his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, Warhol is probably best known to people with a passing familiarity with the artist for his famous quote: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Although those words have become synonymous with short-lived fame and tabloid stardom born of scandal and the public’s appetite for sensationalism, they have been prophetic in the age of the internet, when the potentiality of celebrity is open to virtually anyone.

According to Victor Bockris, the idea of fame and the machinery of celebrity creation were a guiding obsession for Andy Warhol. Just as images of product packaging and pop culture icons were grist for the pop art mill, so was life as lived by the famous. From artists and musicians to junkies, drag queens, and Bohemians, Warhol declared the denizens of his famous Factory “superstars.” A microcosm of the studio system of the 1930s and ’40s, Warhol’s circle of associates and muses generated publicity for the artist while enjoying a degree of fame by association. Among them were actress and model Edie Sedgwick (the most celebrated of Warhol’s superstars), musician Nico, and artist and author Ultra Violet.

In 1972, musician Lou Reed released the single “Walk on the Wild Side” from his second solo album Transformer. The song recounts the true stories of several of Warhol’s superstars, including trandgender actresses Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling and gay icons Joe “Sugar Plum Fairy” Campbell and Joseph “Little Joe” Dallesandro.

The Factory was a magnet for Bohemians, artists, celebrities, junkies, and eccentrics of every stripe. Among the notorious characters to cross its famous threshold was Valerie Solanas. A radical feminist and would-be Warhol superstar, Solanas had made a reputation for herself as the author of The SCUM Manifesto, a self-published screed arguing for the elimination of men as a solution to the world’s problems.

As recounted by biographer Victor Bockris, Solanas approached Warhol in 1967 about producing a play she had written. Warhol agreed to look over Solanas’ work, but busy and inundated by unsolicited manuscripts and art from would-be artists and writers, he lost the script. By way of apology, Warhol offered an incensed Solanas a role in his film I, a Man. Solanas accepted. For a while, the situation seemed resolved to her satisfaction, but soon, she was again leveling outlandish accusations and threats at the artist.

On June 3, 1968, over the protests of Warhol associate Paul Morrisey, Solanas made her way into the Factory, drew a pistol, and shot Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya. Wounded in both lungs, the spleen, and the esophagus, Warhol survived but faced a lifetime of physical and emotional distress. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Solanas was charged with reckless assault and sentenced to three years in prison.

As recounted by Victor Bockris, the early 1980s saw Andy Warhol facing a backlash in the artistic community for what they perceived as crass commercialism in his art. In a decade marked by conspicuous consumption, the accusations leveled at Warhol seem ironic in retrospect. Under fire for his celebrity portraits, Warhol faced some of the harshest criticism of his career. Warhol, who had never shied from the commercial element that had always been central to his pop art philosophy, took the criticism in stride. When asked by a television reporter to respond to a critic’s declaration that the paintings were terrible, a gum-chewing Warhol nonchalantly replied, “He’s right.”

Nevertheless, a new generation was venerating Warhol. Among them was a hip and iconoclastic street artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat. A proponent of Neo-expressionism, Basquiat partnered with Warhol on joint art exhibitions, the young artist renewing Warhol’s passion for painting.