Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol understood something few artists ever grasp: that in the modern age, the self could be a brand, an image endlessly repeated until it shimmered like a soup can on a supermarket shelf. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, he began as a commercial illustrator before turning advertising and celebrity into fine art, giving us the Campbell's Soup Cans, the Marilyn Diptych, the films Empire and Chelsea Girls, and that immortal prophecy of fifteen minutes of fame.

His Sun sits in Leo, the lion in its own domicile, at full radiant strength: born to be the sun of his own solar system, magnetic, theatrical, impossible not to notice even behind the pale wig and dark glasses. Yet that Sun blazes in the twelfth house, the unknowable house of spirit and dissolution, so his celebrity always carried a ghostly, half-absent quality, a saint of surfaces hiding behind them. His Aries Moon gave him a driven, warrior interior, the doer who founded The Factory, produced The Velvet Underground and launched Interview. His Leo Ascendant crowned it all: the signature hair, the regal presence, the mask of a king. He held the torch, and we still gather to its glow.