Pop Art emerged in the 1950s when a long-standing dispute between high art adherers and mass culture followers intensified: some artists and critics believed that art was for the elite, while others thought that it should be democratized through using the imagery of mass culture the consumer society could understand.

One of the founders of Pop Art, the American artist and designer Andy Warhol stated numerous times that he depicted money, Elvis Presley and Campbell soup because those were the things he enjoyed: they were part of his life, and he believed this to be equally true for all American people regardless of their social status.

The universalism, skillful reaction to the most daring challenges of the time and talent of a hoaxer made Warhol an iconic figure. Warhol’s signature technique was making copy images of everyday objects to make the viewers believe in the democratized art, where practically anyone could be an artist.

In the 1970s, Warhol began creating portraits of famous people of culture, business, politics, film, and music. He painted pictures from Polaroid photographs, which he took and processed himself. A photograph showing Andy Warhol taking pictures of the German collector Peter Ludwig for a series of portraits has survived to this day.

Warhol selected successful photos and discussed them with the client. Then he enlarged the images and transferred them to a toned canvas using the method of photographic silkscreen printing.

As a rule, Warhol created a series of four to six variations. In addition to the portrait of Ludwig, housed by the Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum, this series has other pictures as well, which are different by the arrangement of stripes of color in them. One of those variations is kept in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

The portrait of Ludwig combines a figurative black-and-white image and a luminous, vividly colored surface, creating a dramatic contrast. The spots of local color, which vary in every one of the copies, enhance the feeling of the portrait’s uniqueness.