Hamburger

Many of Andy Warhol’s most instantly recognizable works feature images of food products, for example, the Campbell’s Soup Cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Del Monte peaches, and, in this case, a silkscreened image of a hamburger. Rendered in a black and white color scheme with bold outlines and the tag line “Hamburger” spread beneath, this work at once reveals and exploits the relationship between advertisements and art that was central to Warhol’s enduring oeuvre. Beginning his career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol frequently appropriates graphic design and promotional or marketing materials for his artwork. The text below the burger is drawn in capital letters, and the burger is surrounded by radiating lines, recalling the end scene of an animated commercial, where the final product is being awarded to the viewer. The background of the text is intentionally off-register, a stylistic quality Warhol utilizes to align his pictures with the grainy quality of newspaper advertisements. Treating the hamburger like a Marilyn portrait, Warhol first simplifies the overall drawing, addressing only the defining characteristics of the subject. The flatness of the bun and the uncomplicated nature of the ingredients draw parallels to its ubiquitous nature. It is not a juicy, extravagantly topped burger, but a stereotype of the food, giving the image a representational, rather than handcrafted attribution. Warhol often inverted his traditional colored representations into negatives, adding the subtitle “Reversal” to portraits. This dramatic choice illuminates the shadows of the image and casts a darker interpretation on the Hamburger’s subject matter. The significance of the hamburger meat as a creation of edible flesh alludes to this malevolent theme that is unique to the inverted prints.
The artist’s career-long obsession with concepts of mass production and consumerism are evident in Andy Warhol’s study of the Hamburger. The factory-like construction of fast food franchises piqued Warhol’s interest, and in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the artist writes “The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet” (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Orlando, 1975, p.71). Warhol identifies with the theory that, no matter what class a person belongs to, everyday brand names, such as McDonald’s, are consumed in the same manner. The audience of a print advertisement or commercial knows, and trusts, that they can enjoy the same Coca-Cola or hamburger as a celebrity.
Born in 1928, immediately before the Great Depression, to a middle class family in Pittsburgh, Warhol lived through an era of War-time food rationing. As he aged, American eating habits shifted dramatically with an economic boom and the invention of the “supermarket.” Inspired by this new wave of corporation culture and consumerism, the Hamburger represents an everyday luxury available at a minimal cost with little to no effort. Warhol relished in the convenience of ready-made meals, so much so that he considered opening a series of ANDY-MATS – “The Restaurant for the Lonely Person,” serving microwaved frozen meals in TV booths. Hamburger is preceded by a number of food-consumption-themed short films made in the 1960’s, including Eat (1963), which is a single take of Robert Indiana eating a mushroom, slowed down to the length of forty-five minutes, and the series Mario Banana #1 and Mario Banana #2 (1964), in which Mario Montez devours a banana on camera. Perhaps this Hamburger, printed between 1985 and 1986, was in part inspired by an earlier artistic project, 66 Scenes from America (1982), produced by Jᴓrgen Leth, which Andy Warhol participated in. In a single three-minute take, Warhol quickly ingests a Burger King Whopper, which he chose over two neutrally-packaged burgers, before looking into the camera and announcing, “My name is Andy Warhol and I just finished eating a hamburger.”