"The important thing is to infuse everything with as much drama as you can." — Andy Warhol

"I never met an animal I didn’t like." — Andy Warhol

After graduating, Warhol moved to New York and earned his living as a commercial illustrator. In the late 1950s he began to paint. He produced images of Coke bottles, dollar bills, Brillo boxes, animals, and flowers. Using a silk-screen printing process, he began mass-producing these ordinary images of consumer goods. He had painted famous people, too, and found he liked printing variations of these celebrity portraits in garish colors. The silk-screen technique, with its ability to repeat images endlessly, reflected his view of American culture as empty. Warhol’s work placed him in the forefront of the emerging pop art movement in the United States.

Warhol also made films. Usually classified as underground movies, his works include The Chelsea Girls (1966), Eat (1963), My Hustler (1965), and Blue Movie (1969). The films are known for their eroticism, plotlessness, and length — one runs some 25 hours.

He published books, including Andy Warhol’s Exposures (1969) and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975). In 1969 he founded Interview, a magazine of fashion news, film, art, and high society gossip that is still popular. In the 1970s he began recording his daily movements in conversations with Pat Hackett, who published them after his death as The Andy Warhol Diaries.

In 1987 Andy Warhol, 59, died after gall bladder surgery. He bequeathed funds to establish a foundation for young artists.

Andy Warhol is widely thought of as a great painter of contemporary society and its objects. His art reflects the events and myths of 20th-century America. Besides the endangered species series, he created a skull series, a guns-and-knives series, a disaster series, an electric chair series, a 13-most-wanted-men series, a 10-American-myths series, and a 10-Jews-of-the-20th-century series.

Warhol captured the spirit of American consumerism. His corpus includes many renderings of pedestrian objects. While depicting objects — and even people — as having mechanical qualities, he imparts to them a new level of meaning. An able self-promoter, Warhol deliberately cultivated an aura of mystery about his person — perhaps to lend his art an air of mystery as well. In his work he overstates and glamorizes, making it more difficult to reach judgments and see clear meaning. This exaggeration accentuates the detachment of the viewer from the image.

Warhol’s typical style can be seen in the Endangered Species prints. The gaudy colors and heavy line quality make the animal portraits abstract, two-dimensional, and full of tension. At the same time Warhol has humanized these animals, making them seem emotional and intriguing. He sees beneath the surface, although many critics see his art as "only" about the surface. This exhibition is both vivid and powerful.