Possibly the most famous of all American artists, Andy Warhol was also an avant-garde filmmaker, writer and social figure. He also worked as a publisher, music producer and actor. With his background and experience in commercial art, Warhol was one of the founders of the Pop Art movement in the United States in the 1950s.
Warhol is best known for his images of packaged consumer products and everyday objects like Campbell's Soup cans and for the banana appearing on the cover of the rock music album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). He is also famous for his stylised portraits of twentieth-century celebrity icons, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor.
Though the screenprint method has been around for centuries, Warhol was one of the first artists in modern times to legitimise the screenprint as a fine art technique. Due to the interference of the machine and lack of direct contact between the artist and the medium, many purists were skeptical about the art form, but Warhol exploited this separation, and sought it actively in his work.