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Andy Warhol started life as Andrew Warhola on 6 August 1928, the youngest of three boys born to Andrej and Julia Warhola.

The Warholas were Carpatho-Rusyns who had migrated from Mikova, a small town in what today is north-eastern Slovakia, to Pittsburgh in the US.

At the age of eight, when Warhol was bedridden with a rare neurological illness, St Vitus Dance, he started collecting photographs of movie stars and reading fan magazines, beginning a lifelong love affair with Hollywood and celebrity. At nine, his family bought him a camera and photography too remained a passion.

Warhol took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art) while at school and, after graduating high school, began studies in pictorial design at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1945. He struggled through his first year but the drawings he made in the summer of 1946 – of animals at the zoo and the fruit and vegetables he helped his brother sell at the roadside – won him the Martin B Leisser Prize and a small scholarship he used for another year at college.

During the following summer, Warhol worked in the display department of Horne’s department store, learning many of the tricks of visual display. He also got involved in student activities like the Beaux Arts Society, was the only male in the Modern Dance Club, and edited the student publication ‘Cano’, designing its November 1948 cover (which incorporated the blotted-line technique he’d developed).

On graduating in 1949 he thought to become a teacher or a commercial illustrator. To really succeed, however, he would need to leave Pittsburgh.

In 1949, when his college friend Philip Pearlstein decided to move to New York to pursue his art career, Andy Warhol went too.

Soon after the move, he dropped the ‘a’ from Warhola, having played around for years with variations to his first name, Andrew. (Still in the process of remaking himself, sometime in the mid 1950s he had a nose job.)

Employed by art directors who valued his creative approach at a time when photography was beginning to rule print advertising, Warhol built a roster of clients that included magazines, record labels and the fashion industry. Soon he could afford an assistant, and by the end of the decade he was earning approximately US$70,000 a year (over AU$800,000 in today’s money).

Alongside his commercial work, Warhol began exhibiting his paintings, drawings and books in galleries. In 1952, he had his first solo exhibition, at the Hugo Gallery, with ‘Fifteen drawings based on the writings of Truman Capote’. At places like the Serendipity 3 ice cream parlour/gallery he showed collages and handmade books that he would get his friends to colour in.

In 1956, Warhol took his first trip outside the US – a round-the-world vacation with his friend Charles Lisanby – and had his first piece shown in a public museum – a drawing in a group exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol began recasting his persona from fey adman to cool artist and experimented with new aesthetic approaches that ultimately paved the way for his first pop works.

He made his first concerted body of paintings, and a related group of drawings, at this time, taking as his subject the productions of the advertising industry. In many of these works, Warhol appropriated images from newspapers and magazines (platforms where his own commercial work was still regularly being published) as well as utilising many of the reproduction techniques from his work as an illustrator.

When Warhol showed his Campbell’s soup can series in 1962 – displayed like products in a grocery store – they caused a sensation. Soon his images drawn from popular culture – of everyday things like Brillo boxes or Coca-Cola, or celebrities like Marilyn Monroe – would make him famous internationally. And silkscreened images that incorporated minor irregularities, repeated multiple times, would become his trademark.

Over the next few decades, Warhol worked across the widest possible range of creative activity, making paintings, prints, photographs, films, television programs and magazines, and producing albums and bands – all within his multi-disciplinary, silver-painted, foil-draped studio, The Factory, with his silver-wigged persona as the foreman.

He would go on to become one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture of the 20th century.

Having already established one of the world’s greatest art museums, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Carnegie International, the oldest North American exhibition of international contemporary art, in 1900 philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated another large amount of money to create a technical institute for the city of Pittsburgh. His vision of a school for the city’s working-class men and women would become Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University).

Andy Warhol attended ‘Carnegie Tech’ with other aspiring artists Philip Pearlstein (with whom he would move to New York in 1949), Dorothy Cantor (who married Pearlstein), Bennard B Perlman and Joseph Groell (who became a founding member of the leading Tanager Gallery in New York).

At that stage, and in Pittsburgh especially, training to be an artist rarely meant studying the ‘fine arts’ exclusively; rather, students trained in a diverse range of vocational skills that would serve them as illustrators and commercial artists.

As Perlman recalled: ‘In September 1945, when Andy Warhol and I entered Carnegie Institute of Technology, the school represented a middle-ground approach to educating future artists… Andy was among the 60 freshmen enrolled in painting and design. The majority of the group was female. World War II had ended just the month before; only four of the handful of males were veterans.’

And Groell recalled that: ‘We didn’t have an option to major in painting. We were essentially trained to be art directors, I guess. The concept seemed to be that we studied painting to learn universal principles of design… There was no distinction between fine art and commercial art. They vested both as “good design”.’

For Andy Warhol, before New York, there was Pittsburgh, where he was born and raised.

Long known as Steel City, in Warhol’s time it was a manufacturing and commercial powerhouse. Built in an area abundant in coal, petroleum, gas and iron, the town had grown fat on the demand for metal and arms during the American Civil War. (The names of eye-wateringly rich industrialists Carnegie, Mellon and Frick are still synonymous with the place.)

Part of that legacy is a wealth of culture and education, including the University of Pittsburgh – where Warhol thought he might study to become an art teacher – and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) – where he did study commercial art.

It’s also evident in Pittsburgh’s migrant heritage – including Europeans and African Americans from the south, in the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries – which you can see reflected in its neighbourhoods and food. (Warhol’s parents, the Warholas, had themselves migrated from what is now Slovakia.)

And you can see it in the architecture – the workers terraces and grand houses as well as now-obsolete industrial infrastructure which has since been reimagined. (The Andy Warhol Museum is one example; it’s located in a former warehouse for products sold to mills and mines, originally built in 1911.)

Pittsburgh’s long boom had gone bust by the 1980s with the collapse of the local steel industry followed by major industrial corporations closing their offices. (Not Heinz, however. The famous food company – founded near Pittsburgh in the late 19th century – still has its world headquarters there.)

Now, the once-sooty industrial centre has transformed into a gleaming technology and innovation hub and, in the process, become one of the world’s hippest cities.