 Andy Warhol
Heinz Box, 1964
© The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. |
With his
"grocery-carton" boxes of the mid-1960s, Warhol carried his consumer-product
imagery into the realm of sculpture. Employing carpenters to build scores of plywood boxes
identical in size and shape to supermarket cartons, Warhol then silkscreened the boxes
with the logos of the different consumer products -- Kellogg's corn flakes, Mott's apple
juice, Del Monte peaches, Heinz ketchup. Stacked like warehouse cartons, these
"trompe l'oeil" sculptures were virtually indistinguishable from the cardboard
originals. Warhol first exhibited his boxes in 1964, filling the Stable Gallery in New
York with hundreds of them to create the look of a cramped warehouse. He invited
collectors to buy them by the stack, and though they did not sell well, the boxes caused a
furor comparable to his slightly earlier paintings Campbell's Soup Cans. Their
mundane, commercial subject matter -- "I wanted something ordinary," Warhol
later said -- infuriated the critics. With the perfectly blank, "machine-made"
look of Warhol's boxes, the artist's hand seemed to have vanished.
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