The silver wig, the dark sunglasses, the blank stare: Andy Warhol presented himself as a machine without sentiment. This episode looks behind that carefully designed logo to find Andrew Warhola, born in 1928 to Rusyn immigrant parents in working-class Pittsburgh, who lost his father to contaminated mine water and nearly died at eight from Sydenham's chorea after scarlet fever. Bedridden and isolated, he escaped into comic books and Hollywood fan magazines, learning the visual language of celebrity that would define his career.

We follow his rapid success as a commercial illustrator using the blotted line technique, his breakthrough into fine art by removing emotion and the artist's hand through silkscreen printing, and the philosophy of egalitarian consumerism behind the Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. We enter the silver-lined  ...