Born in 1930 at Pittsburgh of Czechoslovak immigrant parents. In 1954 he left school with a high school diploma. Between 1945 and 1949 he studied pictorial design and art history, sociology and psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh. Met Philip Pearlstein and moved to New York with him in 1949. He worked for "Vogue" and "Harper's Bazaar", did window displays for Bonwit Teller and his first advertisements for I. Miller shoe company. In 1952 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Hugo Gallery, New York. He designed stage sets, dyed his hair straw-blond and moved into a house in Lexington Avenue with his mother and several cats. In 1954 he was in a collective exhibition at the Loft Gallery, New York. In 1956 he had an individual exhibition of his drawings for Boy Book at the Bodley Gallery, and his Golden Shoes were exhibited in Madison Avenue. He travelled in Europe and Asia. In 1960 he made his first pictures based on comic-strips and company trade names. In 1962 he produced his silkscreen prints on canvas of dollar notes, Campbell's Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, etc. He was also included in the exhibition The New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, and started his series of disaster pictures: Car Crash, Plane Crash, Suicide, Tunafish Disaster and Electric Chair. Between 1962 and 1964 he produced over 2,000 pictures in his "Factory". In 1963 he made the movies Sleep (6 hours long) and Empire (8 hours long).

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