Chapter 2
Art School
In September 1945, Andy began college in the Department of Painting and Design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). He struggled during his first year. He was only seventeen and did not have the reading or writing skills he needed for college-level work.
In college, Andy discovered something important about himself. Being shy and quiet seemed to make others want to help him. He attracted people by not saying much. When he was quiet, people wondered what he was thinking. They became interested in him. He was able to get his new classmates to help him with his schoolwork. Writing was especially difficult for Andy. He sometimes asked his friends to help write papers for him.
Even art classes weren’t easy for Andy. Everyone could see that he had talent, but he never seemed to do what his teachers wanted or expected. Once, he cut one of his pictures into four pieces and handed the pieces in for four assignments. The teachers didn’t know what to do. They looked at his drawings and liked what they saw. But he hadn’t done the assignment properly. It wouldn’t be right to give him a good grade.
Andy’s grades were so bad at the end of his first year that he almost wasn’t allowed to return to the Carnegie Institute. He begged for a second chance. He took summer-school classes and worked very hard. By the end of the summer he was allowed to resume his studies.
During that summer, Andy worked with his brother Paul, selling fruits and vegetables from a truck. Andy sketched their customers, sometimes selling the pictures he drew. He also used his sketches to apply for a scholarship that helped him pay for the rest of his years at Carnegie.
Everyone at Carnegie agreed that Andy’s art stood out. He certainly had his own style. His work always seemed to look perfect on the first try. He had a good eye for design, too. (Design means the way things are placed together in a work of art.) If another student asked for help, he suggested how to move images around in the picture to make it look better. His classmates thought he was a genius.
He also chose subjects that shocked people. For a city art exhibition, he submitted a drawing of a boy picking his nose. His picture was not chosen for the exhibit. However, it made people talk about him. Andy was learning how to get attention.
Andy hadn’t decided what he would do after college. At first, he thought he would be an art teacher in Pittsburgh. Then he got a summer job decorating the windows of a Pittsburgh department store and discovered that he liked fashion and design. One of his teachers thought Andy and his friend Philip Pearlstein could be successful as commercial artists, drawing pictures for advertisements and magazines. So, after graduation, Andy and Philip left Pittsburgh for New York. They were ready to try to make it as artists in the big city.