Anniversary gallery: Andy Warhol's illustrations.

IN THE EARLY 1950s, a young artist from Pittsburgh showed up at the Dance Magazine office, then in midtown Manhattan, looking for work. "He was such a pathetic little thing," says Dance Magazine's Doris Hering, who worked in the office at the time. "He was so pale and had crazy white blond hair." The former member of the Modern Dance club at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) had already created a few dance paintings and he was hired to do illustrations for the magazine. In 1951 his name, Andy Warhol, began appearing next to line drawings of odd little figures-from a kickline of chorus girls, to ballerinas at the barre, to a pair of long, sexy legs.

Though the Prince of Pop is most famous for his Campbell's soup cans and portraits of pop icons like Marilyn Monroe and EIvis Presley, some of Warhol's early styles and motifs developed in our pages. His drawings were done with blotted line technique-made with no sheets of paper and a fountain pen that created broken, hesitant lines. For articles about funding, he drew sacks of gold coins. He would later go on to create paintings of dollar signs and say, "1 like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall."

By the late '50s, Warhoi had become one of the most successful commercial graphic illustrators in NYC. In addition to Dance Magazine, he was drawing for Vogue and The New Yorker as well as for print ads and department store window dis plays. His shoe drawings for I.Miller (the Manolo Blahnik of the time) propelled him into the spotlight. In 1958 his collaged set of pointe shoes made of lace appeared on our cover. In February 1959 he created another cover, this time a portrait of Doris Humphrey.

His involvement in dance extended beyond drawing figures and pointe shoes, in 1968 Warhol collaborated with Merce Cunningham to create the landmark work RainForest, filling the set with floating silver pillows. He was friends with Rudolf Nureyev (who hung out at Warhol's studio, the Factory) and Martha Graham (who was the subject of three prints Warhol made using Barbara Morgan's photographs).

Warhol's love of dance is clear from our pages, and his passion may have run even deeper. His brother John has said: "Andy always wanted to be a tap dancer."