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Lot Essay
“Because of the success of his first show at the Stable
Gallery, Andy attained a degree of celebrity unshared
by other artists in the Pop movement. …More than
any artist of comparable importance, Andy intuited
the great changes that made the 1960s the Sixties,
and helped shape the era he lived through, so that his
art both became part of his times and transcended
them. …He changed the concept of art itself, so that
his work induced a transformation in art’s philosophy
so deep that it was no longer possible to think of art
in the same way that it had been thought of even a
few years before him. … One thing that has to be said
about the Brillo Boxes is that they are beautiful. My
wife and I have lived with one for years, and I still
marvel at its beauty. Why live with dull anesthetic
objects? Why not objects as beautiful as Brillo Box?”
(A. C. Danto, “The Brillo Box,” Andy Warhol, 2009, pp. 47-8; 66)
It was arguably the single most important event of the Pop era—the 1964 exhibition at Manhattan’s Stable Gallery that showed Andy Warhol’s groundbreaking and now-iconic Brillo Box sculptures. As Victor Bockis, a friend of Warhol’s at the time, enthused, “The opening became another rallying point for those for and against the new [Pop] art. Lines of people a block long waited to get in. ‘The most striking opening of that period was definitely Andy’s Brillo Box show,’ said Robert Indiana. ‘You could barely get in, and it was like going through a maze. The rows of boxes were just wide enough to squeeze your way through.’…It was one of the seminal events of the early sixties” (V. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, New York, 2003, p. 198).
Although Warhol made several types of supermarket merchandise box sculptures—including Del Monte peaches, Campbell’s tomato juice, Mott’s apple juice, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, and Heinz tomato ketchup—it was the Brillo Soap Pads boxes that captured the attention of the press, public and collectors. Invoking the haphazard stacking of a supermarket stockroom, the Stable Gallery event displayed Warhol’s unique re-creations of bulk-quantity supermarket packaging by alternately stacking the boxes and by scattering them about the gallery space, displaying them in such a way as to signal that they were available for purchase either as individual items or in quantities (mixed or multiples of the same box design).
Working with concepts of appropriation similar to those Jasper Johns embraced in creating his sculptural work that referenced the Ballantine Ale can, Warhol, too, with just minor alteration, appropriated design motifs and imagery from the mass-produced consumer goods he saw in supermarkets. Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s long-time assistant and confidant, observed “Andy was fascinated by the shelves of foodstuffs in supermarkets and the repetitive, machine-like effect they created” G. Malanga, Archiving Warhol: Writings and Photographs, New York, 2002, p. 94).
By re-creating a facsimile of the Brillo Box product using different materials, Warhol produced an entirely new high-art object that paid homage to the humble, original consumer item. Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures possess an uncanny, one-to-one correspondence with the originals that they refer to—remarkably like their original in appearance and form, yet different. In subject matter, they extend Warhol’s earlier Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, but proceeding closer to their original through Warhol’s decision to render them in three dimensions, where the Campbell’s Soup paintings were in two-dimensions and thus further abstracted from reality. With the Campbell’s Soup works, Warhol had investigated multiple repetitions of the same image in a two-dimensional format; with the Brillo Boxes, Warhol turned his attention to representing a repetitive image in the form of three-dimensional sculpture.
The actual Brillo box product design itself—the 24-count, early ‘60s-era red, white, and blue soap pads box—has long been superseded by newer designs from the same company that continues to sell the household cleaning product to this day. Were its design not immortalized by Andy Warhol with his extraordinary talent for turning mass culture into fine art, the eye-popping colors and type face of the Brillo design from this era would probably be largely forgotten except by a few who bought the product during its heyday and remember it with nostalgia. More significantly, though, Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures marked a number of firsts for Warhol, and they signaled the triumph of Pop’s extraordinary ability to capture the attention of the general public and sophisticated art collectors both, even as they paid homage to their art historical lineage: the strategy deriving from the work of Marcel Duchamp and other pioneers of the twentieth century artistic approach known as the readymade.
The Brillo Boxes marked Warhol’s inaugural foray into the medium of sculpture. They were the first substantial body of work Warhol created in the legendary East 47th Street studio he named “The Factory.” Further, the Brillo Boxes were Warhol’s first sustained effort toward a method of creating art that employed craftsmen and studio assistants in the production process, rather than the artist’s hand alone. They merged hand painting with the mechanical silkscreen process. The unpainted wooden boxes themselves were specified to order from a fabrication shop, a process now widely employed by contemporary artists, but extraordinary in the 1960s.
With his Brillo Box sculptures, Warhol was not only challenging long held beliefs as to what art could and should be, he was also taking aim at an idea central to Western fine art practice: that an artwork must be handmade and an entirely original work of art. His work was destabilizing traditional notions of uniqueness and originality as these concepts pertained to works of art.
Gallery, Andy attained a degree of celebrity unshared
by other artists in the Pop movement. …More than
any artist of comparable importance, Andy intuited
the great changes that made the 1960s the Sixties,
and helped shape the era he lived through, so that his
art both became part of his times and transcended
them. …He changed the concept of art itself, so that
his work induced a transformation in art’s philosophy
so deep that it was no longer possible to think of art
in the same way that it had been thought of even a
few years before him. … One thing that has to be said
about the Brillo Boxes is that they are beautiful. My
wife and I have lived with one for years, and I still
marvel at its beauty. Why live with dull anesthetic
objects? Why not objects as beautiful as Brillo Box?”
(A. C. Danto, “The Brillo Box,” Andy Warhol, 2009, pp. 47-8; 66)
It was arguably the single most important event of the Pop era—the 1964 exhibition at Manhattan’s Stable Gallery that showed Andy Warhol’s groundbreaking and now-iconic Brillo Box sculptures. As Victor Bockis, a friend of Warhol’s at the time, enthused, “The opening became another rallying point for those for and against the new [Pop] art. Lines of people a block long waited to get in. ‘The most striking opening of that period was definitely Andy’s Brillo Box show,’ said Robert Indiana. ‘You could barely get in, and it was like going through a maze. The rows of boxes were just wide enough to squeeze your way through.’…It was one of the seminal events of the early sixties” (V. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, New York, 2003, p. 198).
Although Warhol made several types of supermarket merchandise box sculptures—including Del Monte peaches, Campbell’s tomato juice, Mott’s apple juice, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, and Heinz tomato ketchup—it was the Brillo Soap Pads boxes that captured the attention of the press, public and collectors. Invoking the haphazard stacking of a supermarket stockroom, the Stable Gallery event displayed Warhol’s unique re-creations of bulk-quantity supermarket packaging by alternately stacking the boxes and by scattering them about the gallery space, displaying them in such a way as to signal that they were available for purchase either as individual items or in quantities (mixed or multiples of the same box design).
Working with concepts of appropriation similar to those Jasper Johns embraced in creating his sculptural work that referenced the Ballantine Ale can, Warhol, too, with just minor alteration, appropriated design motifs and imagery from the mass-produced consumer goods he saw in supermarkets. Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s long-time assistant and confidant, observed “Andy was fascinated by the shelves of foodstuffs in supermarkets and the repetitive, machine-like effect they created” G. Malanga, Archiving Warhol: Writings and Photographs, New York, 2002, p. 94).
By re-creating a facsimile of the Brillo Box product using different materials, Warhol produced an entirely new high-art object that paid homage to the humble, original consumer item. Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures possess an uncanny, one-to-one correspondence with the originals that they refer to—remarkably like their original in appearance and form, yet different. In subject matter, they extend Warhol’s earlier Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, but proceeding closer to their original through Warhol’s decision to render them in three dimensions, where the Campbell’s Soup paintings were in two-dimensions and thus further abstracted from reality. With the Campbell’s Soup works, Warhol had investigated multiple repetitions of the same image in a two-dimensional format; with the Brillo Boxes, Warhol turned his attention to representing a repetitive image in the form of three-dimensional sculpture.
The actual Brillo box product design itself—the 24-count, early ‘60s-era red, white, and blue soap pads box—has long been superseded by newer designs from the same company that continues to sell the household cleaning product to this day. Were its design not immortalized by Andy Warhol with his extraordinary talent for turning mass culture into fine art, the eye-popping colors and type face of the Brillo design from this era would probably be largely forgotten except by a few who bought the product during its heyday and remember it with nostalgia. More significantly, though, Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures marked a number of firsts for Warhol, and they signaled the triumph of Pop’s extraordinary ability to capture the attention of the general public and sophisticated art collectors both, even as they paid homage to their art historical lineage: the strategy deriving from the work of Marcel Duchamp and other pioneers of the twentieth century artistic approach known as the readymade.
The Brillo Boxes marked Warhol’s inaugural foray into the medium of sculpture. They were the first substantial body of work Warhol created in the legendary East 47th Street studio he named “The Factory.” Further, the Brillo Boxes were Warhol’s first sustained effort toward a method of creating art that employed craftsmen and studio assistants in the production process, rather than the artist’s hand alone. They merged hand painting with the mechanical silkscreen process. The unpainted wooden boxes themselves were specified to order from a fabrication shop, a process now widely employed by contemporary artists, but extraordinary in the 1960s.
With his Brillo Box sculptures, Warhol was not only challenging long held beliefs as to what art could and should be, he was also taking aim at an idea central to Western fine art practice: that an artwork must be handmade and an entirely original work of art. His work was destabilizing traditional notions of uniqueness and originality as these concepts pertained to works of art.