Description

Andy Warhol Original Crayon Drawing ‘3 bottles Coca-Cola’

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)

Crayon study on heavy structured paper

Handsigned below the bottles, middle-right

Undated but estimated from 1962

Unframed but this is one of  about 6 original drawings which were used for litho prints.

Size : 40 x 30 cm

Comes with documents from the Leo Castelli Gallery where this drawing was bought in 1994 and a ‘Authenticity Certificate’ issued by the Andy Warhol Foundation and signed by Donald Warhola (Vice President) and Sally King-Nero (Curator)

Before his fame and wealth, Warhol made his living as an illustrator for hire. He won advertising awards for his work for radio networks and pharmaceutical companies, but it was his editorial fashion and beauty drawings that won him attention.

In the 1960s Andy Warhol turned the seemingly ordinary into art, taking everyday objects like Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo pad boxes and screen printing their images onto canvases or turning them into sculptures. Coca-Cola also served as one of Warhol’s muses

“He was working in the early ‘60s, and he was trying to figure out who he wanted to be as an artist, and he was fascinated by popular culture, marketing, and advertising, and consumer and a world that was really just starting to think about Mad Men – the ‘50s, advertising starts kicking off in a big way and he’s inspired, but he’s living in a world of Abstract Expressionists, so he’s trying to decide who he should be,” said High Museum of Art (Atlanta) curator Julia Forbes. “He starts taking all these advertisements, clipping them out, collaging them together, and then he starts making paintings, and one of the first experiments he starts doing is with Coca-Cola.”

Warhol used Coca-Cola as a subject in his art for four decades, beginning in the 1950s with an ink-on-gouache drawing of a Coca-Cola bottle with a pair of legs. Then in the ‘60s, he added some color, tearing out Coca-Cola ads from magazines to use them in collages, and silk screening three bottles on linen. In 1966 he placed a Coca-Cola bottle on screen tests with Lou Reed and Nico, before creating a sculpture of silver spray paint-covered Coca-Cola bottles in a wooden crate in 1967.

In the ‘80s Warhol photographed Coca-Cola memorabilia, and in 1985, he spilled actual Coca-Cola on paper when Time magazine commissioned him to create a cover for what would be Coca-Cola’s unpopular new formula. The news magazine opted not to use the pieces, probably prompting Warhol to think that the Coca-Cola bottle makes for better art than Coca-Cola itself.

Info on Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola, Jr. (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987), known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and member of highly diverse social circles that included Bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy patrons.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression “15 minutes of fame.” In his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Andy Warhol Museum exists in memory of his life and artwork.

Warhol showed early artistic talent and studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (now Carnegie Mellon University). In 1949, he moved to New York City and began a career in magazine illustration and advertising. During the 1950s, he gained fame for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements. These were done in a loose, blotted-ink style, and figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York. With the concurrent rapid expansion of the record industry and the introduction of the vinyl record, Hi-Fi, and stereophonic recordings, RCA Records hired Warhol, along with another freelance artist, Sid Maurer, to design album covers and promotional materials.

He began exhibiting his work during the 1950s. Amongst them, exhibitions at the Hugo Gallery, and the Bodley Gallery in New York City and in California his first one-man art-gallery exhibition was on July 9 1962, in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles. The exhibition marked his West Coast debut of pop art. Andy Warhol’s first New York solo pop art exhibition was hosted at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery November 6–24, 1962. The exhibit included the works Marilyn Diptych, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles and 100 Dollar Bills. At the Stable Gallery exhibit, the artist met for the first time poet John Giorno who would star in Warhol’s first film, Sleep, in 1963.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell’s Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor.

Among the imagery tackled by Warhol were dollar bills, celebrities and brand name products. He also used as imagery for his paintings newspaper headlines or photographs of mushroom clouds, electric chairs, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters. Warhol also used Coca Cola bottles as subject matter for paintings.

Warhol had a re-emergence of critical and financial success as from the 1970’s, partially due to his affiliation and friendships with a number of prolific younger artists, who were dominating the “bull market” of ’70 & ’80s New York art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and other so-called Neo-Expressionists, as well as members of the Transavantgarde movement in Europe, including Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi. During this time Warhol created the Michael Jackson painting signifying his success attributed to his best-selling album Thriller.

By this period, Warhol was being criticized for becoming merely a “business artist”. In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or indication of the significance of the subjects. They also criticized his 1980 exhibit of 10 portraits at the Jewish Museum in New York, entitled Jewish Geniuses, which Warhol – who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews – had described in his diary as ‘They’re going to sell.’ In hindsight, however, some critics have come to view Warhol’s superficiality and commerciality as “the most brilliant mirror of our times,” contending that “Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture in the 1970s.