Lot Essay
Challenging the romantic ideals of painting, Mario Schifano's Coca-Cola adopts the language of commerce, but its intention lies far from a vulgar expression of materialism. Instead, the painting engages in an analysis of semiotics to highlight the inherently political signs and systems taken for granted taken for granted in our everyday lives. After a period creating monochromatic paintings in household enamels, Schifano began to integrate common symbols of the modern urban landscape into his work of the early sixties to unite the reality of contemporary life with the rarefied world of art. Fragmenting the logos of American owned corporations Coca-Cola and Esso, Schifano created bold ideograms that examine the conveyance of meaning through language and symbols while also commenting on the global spread of U.S. marketeering.
The high impact, red brushwork in this painting from 1962, defines a section of the unmistakable calligraphic curls of the Coca-Cola company logo. The viewer is impeded from reading the iconic cursive text, to the point that no letter is represented completely, but the ubiquitous presence of the emblem in our everyday lives renders it instantly recognisable. Schifano does not directly imitate slick promotional signs but renders them on tactile layers of paper in a loose painterly style, adding a human element to typically mechanically produced signage. The expressive brush marks and abstracted nature of the segmented typography here creates a deceptive camouflage for an emblem that signifies the power of repetitive advertising, but the worldwide familiarity of the graphic swirls stubbornly refuse to be taken at face value.
As a European artist appropriating an emblem described in the 1950s as the 'sublimated essence of all America stands for' (W.A. White cited in 'The Sun Never Sets on Cacoola', Time, 15 May 1950, https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,820569,00.html), Schifano's painting takes on a different significance from that of Pop artists based in the U.S. who were simultaneously replicating similar commercial imagery. Whilst much post-war advertising promoted the idea that commercialism was equitable with egalitarian values, the history of international capitalist ventures held a very different significance in Europe. During World War II, Coca-Cola's popularity spread with the invading U.S. armies in its mission to be 'always within an arm's length of desire' (R. Woodruff cited in Ibid). After the war, the impoverished and ruined cities of Europe saw a rise in Communist party politics that resisted any victory for U.S. enterprise and reviled Coke as one of the leading symbols of capitalist colonisation. In Rome, the Communist-line newspaper Il Paese portrayed the soft drink's widespread presence as a threat, describing the company as a 'red-uniformed army which today has an outpost . . . even in the remotest parts of our countryside' (cited in 'Italian Invasion', Time, Aug. 27 1949, https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,800637,00.html). Despite these protests from the extreme left wing, the push to stabilize world economies through free trade prevailed, leading into a period of unprecedented industrial growth in Italy and the rapid rise of consumer culture during the fifties and sixties. Placing Schifano's work in this historical context, the calculated choice of the Coca-Cola logo signals his greater purpose in exploring the company's typographic aesthetics, deliberately involving the painting in the debate surrounding the influence of American culture and politics in Europe during the 20th century.
The high impact, red brushwork in this painting from 1962, defines a section of the unmistakable calligraphic curls of the Coca-Cola company logo. The viewer is impeded from reading the iconic cursive text, to the point that no letter is represented completely, but the ubiquitous presence of the emblem in our everyday lives renders it instantly recognisable. Schifano does not directly imitate slick promotional signs but renders them on tactile layers of paper in a loose painterly style, adding a human element to typically mechanically produced signage. The expressive brush marks and abstracted nature of the segmented typography here creates a deceptive camouflage for an emblem that signifies the power of repetitive advertising, but the worldwide familiarity of the graphic swirls stubbornly refuse to be taken at face value.
As a European artist appropriating an emblem described in the 1950s as the 'sublimated essence of all America stands for' (W.A. White cited in 'The Sun Never Sets on Cacoola', Time, 15 May 1950, https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,820569,00.html), Schifano's painting takes on a different significance from that of Pop artists based in the U.S. who were simultaneously replicating similar commercial imagery. Whilst much post-war advertising promoted the idea that commercialism was equitable with egalitarian values, the history of international capitalist ventures held a very different significance in Europe. During World War II, Coca-Cola's popularity spread with the invading U.S. armies in its mission to be 'always within an arm's length of desire' (R. Woodruff cited in Ibid). After the war, the impoverished and ruined cities of Europe saw a rise in Communist party politics that resisted any victory for U.S. enterprise and reviled Coke as one of the leading symbols of capitalist colonisation. In Rome, the Communist-line newspaper Il Paese portrayed the soft drink's widespread presence as a threat, describing the company as a 'red-uniformed army which today has an outpost . . . even in the remotest parts of our countryside' (cited in 'Italian Invasion', Time, Aug. 27 1949, https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,800637,00.html). Despite these protests from the extreme left wing, the push to stabilize world economies through free trade prevailed, leading into a period of unprecedented industrial growth in Italy and the rapid rise of consumer culture during the fifties and sixties. Placing Schifano's work in this historical context, the calculated choice of the Coca-Cola logo signals his greater purpose in exploring the company's typographic aesthetics, deliberately involving the painting in the debate surrounding the influence of American culture and politics in Europe during the 20th century.