Andy Warhol could definitely be referred to as one of the best known American artists. During a time where the social norm was a clean cut husband who wore a suit every day to work and the wife stayed at home with the kids in their picture perfect suburban home, Warhol broke the mold and played a significant role in the pop culture movement.

Warhol was born on August 6th, 1928 in Pittsburgh to Andrej and Julia Warhola who were recent Slovakian immigrants. He studied art at the Carnegie Intsitute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) which was and still is one of the most highly regarded art schools in the country. Once out of college, he moved to New York City and began doing commissioned work for various fashion houses particularly a shoe company called I. Miller and Sons which earned him a number of awards from the Art Directors Club. His new renown in the artists’ community allowed him to begin focusing on his own art work which is considered the earliest examples of “Pop art” (Marter 150-3).

What made the Pop art movement so popular isn’t so much the subjects of the individual pieces, but what the subject represented and how they were produced. Warhol wanted to bring meaning to familiar images of the American way of life “that span from the great and the good to the bad and the ugly” (Dawtrey 132). Warhol once said “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (Berg 3). So what makes his art work so meaningful is that he was able to represent our modern society that revolves around mass production and mass consumption and how things that appear to be identical as a whole are actually incredibly unique. This idea represents how although society often times forces people to assimilate and appear similar, people are incredibly unique. What allowed Warhol to do this was his use of silk screening.  Although silk screening is a technique that allows for the replication of an image many times, Warhol was able to alter each individual image by using more or less ink each time which made each image darker and lighter respectively (Dawtrey 132). One of the best examples of this is the Brillo Boxes. When the boxes are stacked together they appear to be identical but it becomes apparent that each one is minutely different.

The Brillo Boxes did a lot to express warhol’s idea of the individual as well as art was perceived. Prior to the boxes it was more clear cut as to what was considered art and what was not. When the boxes were exhibited in New York, Warhol radically changed the world of art as well as how people perceived art and “brought history to an end by demonstrating  that  no  visual  criterion could  serve the purpose of defining art” (Danto 459). All of this came from the fact that each box was almost identical to the Brillo box you would find at the grocery store. It is possible that by creating the boxes in this way, Warhol was trying to express that everything is beautiful and interesting in its own way. The Brillo pad itself also begins to have a more important meaning of what it represents. “Brillo is nothing other than steel wool, an industrial product available… in any hardware store, a part of the masculine world of car refinishing, boat repair, and industrial labor yet the product Brillo belongs to the domestic order, a feminine-gendered space in 1960s America” (Walsh).  This being said, a connection could be made to Warhol’s home of Pittsburgh and its connection with the steel industry and how “steel… also becomes wool. Brillo, through simple packaging, transforms steel wool into the perfect housewife's friend, a faithful ally in the never-ending pursuit of shining aluminum cookware. With the Brillo Boxes, Warhol captured the power of advertising at its most alchemical, powerful enough to mutate substance and gender at will” (Walsh). Warhol represents the complexities of American society with the use of simple and iconic parts of the American life in a way that is not always clear but influential and meaningful. For this reason the Philadelphia Museum of Art surrounded the boxes with a number of Americana art like an American flag painting and Warhol’s own “Jackie” which is four portraits of the American icon, Jacqueline Kennedy.