He was in surgery for six hours. His heart had to be massaged. But Andy Warhol still managed to survive the attempt on his life made by writer Valerie Solanas, who felt that the Pop artist had “too much control over [her] life” after he refused to return a film script she had written for him. The shooting, in 1968, ended the security-free communal existence of his studio, the Factory. Within just a couple of years of his recovery Warhol would be working largely on celebrity portraits and commanding millions of dollars in fees, leaving his scrappy art collective days behind him.

But Pop Art survived beyond Manhattan. In the next decade and a half it became a key mode of protest in the USSR, where artists such as Alexander Kosolapov paired corporate logos with propaganda, as in his work Lenin and Coca-Cola from 1982. And Pop Art would become an even bigger force in China at the dawn of the 21st Century.

How Pop Art changed the World screens on BBC World News on 5 and 6 March 2016 – check the schedule for broadcast times where you are.

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