My 2nd coursework for the Coursera Warhol MOOC being run by Edinburgh University –
Coca Cola Bottles (210), 1962
Andy Warhol was researching the concepts behind American celebrity in the early 1960’s with his paintings and silkscreen prints of Monroe, Taylor and Elvis. At this time he was also working on another American icon tied to both celebrity and money – Coca Cola. A series or drawings, paintings, screen-prints and sculptures followed as Warhol sought to leave behind his commercial illustration roots and move towards fine art [Tate Timeline]. By the 1960’s the distinctively shaped patented bottle and logo made Coca-Cola “one of the most instantly recognisable of twentieth-century American mass-produced artefacts… it had come to represent the commercial supremacy of the United States” [1]. “Warhol knew the power of branding, advertising, marketing and display”[2] and he harnessed this combination provided by Coca-Cola’s promotion success to equate its cultural fame and financial fortune to that of the ordinary American – “a before and after comparison it stands full for an unsatisfied thirst, unfulfilled longing and empty as a recollected universal symbol of Americanism”[3]
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watchingTV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it” [4]
In Warhol’s – Coca Cola Bottles (210), 1962 – the artist combines many of his signature methods. The dramatic large scale work (6’10.5” by 8’9”) has seven rows each with 30 bottles. Filled, part filled and empty with various degrees of turn discernible by the parts of the logo visible, the repeated bottles are painted onto white canvas with synthetic polymer paint in brown and green, the finer line detail then being silkscreen printed over the top in black. The ubiquitous bottles are arranged as if on a display stand but with the variation in their treatment “Warhol is showing the artistic effort rather than the uniformity of normal display… a modern equivalent of a traditional still life.”[5]
Warhol was not the first artist to explore the layers of consumerist meanings that the Coca-cola bottle signified. Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘combine’ sculpture of found objects draws inspiration from the Dada past. In his Coca-cola Plan, 1958, three boxed bottles have grand wings outstretched behind them. Artists grappled with the changing times, as Leo Steinberg noted, “a crucial problem of 20th century art resolves itself when the matter shifts from nature to culture.”[6] Other artists such as Marisol Escobar’s suggestive sculpture Love, 1962, H.C.Westermann’s The Pillar of Truth, 1962, and Robert Arneson’s crate sculpture PeePee, 1964, all seek to address aspects of society, such as gender issues, through the subversion of the well known Coke bottle.[7]
Warhol’s earliest drawings of Coke can be seen in images like Rooster with Coca-Cola Bottle, 1960 – a simple ink drawing. The series continued with paintings of advertisements: the massive oil and wax crayon Coca Cola, 1960; Close Cover Before Striking (Coca-Cola), 1962; the epically scaled stark black and white single bottle Coca Cola, 1962; Three Coke Bottles, 1962; Five Coke bottles, 1962; with Green Coca Cola Bottles, 1962, coming closest in format to the 210 with a painted canvas of 7×16 repeated bottles. The 1962 8”by 10” small print of 2 bottles, with the word “Trade” prominent, belonging to his second studio assistant Nathan Gluck are ominously prescient of the World Trade Centre.
Later works included the sculpture – You’re In, 1967, – a crate of silver sprayed Coke bottles glistening in their fame. The last works he made in the series were colourful prints – New Coke, 1985 – a can lying on its side with a stream of coke pooling before it, the iconic bottle dead and metaphorically bleeding its last.
Pop Art – A Continuing History, Marco Livingston. [1] pp24 [6] pp19
Warhol: A Celebration of Life … And Death, Keith Hartley. [2] pp45
The Life and Works of Andy Warhol, Trewin Copplestone. [3, 5] pp12
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol. [4] pp100
Pop Object: Life Tradition in Pop Art, John Wilmerding. [7]pp76
Other peoples essays can be seen at the course tumblr site.