BASEL.- After a successful career in advertising illustration, Andy Warhol (b. 1928) decided in the early 1960s to work as an independent artist. The world of consumption, of the media and mass industry remained his central interest. The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel focuses on the years between 1961 and 1964, the formative period of Warhol as a painter and graphic artist. During these years, he undertook a fundamental renovation of pictorial expression. As early as the mid-1960s, he opened his oeuvre toward other media, toward the operation of his Factory, the music business, and film. In this period of only four years, Andy Warhol initiated a turn in the history of art whose consequences can be felt to this day. Step by step, he replaced the individual visual language of painting with imagery that had already been disseminated by media and thus become collective as well as mechanical pictorial procedures. The exh