American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol was BOTD in 1928. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Slovakian immigrant parents, he showed an early interest in art, studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. After graduating, he moved to New York, working as a commercial illustrator for a decade. His early sketches of male nudes, Boy Portraits, were deemed too explicit to be publicly exhibited. His career exploded in the late 1950s with giant paintings of everyday consumer products – Campbell’s Soup cans, Kellogg’s Cornflakes boxes and Brillo scouring pads – presented en masse and devoid of historical or narrative context. While many critics were horrified, his “Pop Art” became wildly successful, eloquently mirroring the triumph of mid-20th century capitalism. Inevitably, his focus shifted to celebrity culture, creating screen-prints of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Liza Minnelli, Mao Zedong and Queen Elizabeth II, alongside a new generation of stars including Deborah Harry, Mick Jagger and Muhammad Ali. With cartoonish strokes and vivid jarring colours, he stripped away his subjects’ individuality to reveal them purely as icons. Despite Warhol’s claims that his work had no meaning or intent, critics were nonetheless fascinated by the subversive elements of his work. His 1962 piece Marilyn Diptych – a giant panel with 50 images of Monroe, graduating from pristine and vividly coloured into degraded black-and-white in which her face is erased – has been interpreted as a comment on the destructive nature of celebrity. Belying his public persona as a reclusive wallflower, Warhol was a highly disciplined artist, applying his experience as a commercial designer to the production, sale and promotion of his work. In a radical break with Romantic ideals of artistic individuality, his work was mass-produced and largely created by assistants, with Warhol adding only his signature to guarantee each piece’s commercial value. In 1963, he opened his studio The Factory in Manhattan, a coterie of artists, groupies and celebrities which become a haven for New York’s gay and trans community. Many of his circle became stars of 1960s counterculture, including Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Taylor Mead and Candy Darling, with satellite members including Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, William S. Burroughs, Jack Smith, Fran Lebowitz, Helmut Berger, Grace Jones, Robert Mapplethorpe and Harvey Fierstein. With his regular collaborator Paul Morrissey, he managed and art-directed the influential rock band The Velvet Underground, founded and edited Interview magazine and made a number of experimental films including Sleep, Blow Job, My Hustler and Chelsea Girls. As his celebrity increased in the 1960s, Warhol became his own brand, adopting an easily-imitated silhouette of a badly-fitting silver-grey wig and oversized plastic spectacles and he became a mainstay of legendary New York nightclub Studio 54. In 1968, he was shot and seriously injured by Valerie Solanas, who believed Warhol had stolen her play manuscript. He survived the attack, but required extensive surgery, leaving him with ongoing health problems. His fame (and wealth) consolidated in the 1980s with the explosion of the art market, and he befriended and mentored younger artists Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His status as a pop culture icon was cemented when he appeared as himself in 1980s TV comedy show The Love Boat. Though often perceived as asexual, his lovers included John Giorno, Billy Name and his partner of 12 years Jed Johnson. He died in 1987 aged 58 following complications from surgery. His diaries were published in 1989, covering his life from 1978 until his death and written in the detached, affectless style of a high-functioning autistic. His oft-quoted words, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” eerily predicted the mass narcissism of reality TV and social media, and his own legacy as the 20th century’s most influential pop philosopher.