comparable publications of mass consumptionâtestifies to the universality of such nagging self-dissatisfactions, and the inextinguishable human hope that there are easy ways to health, happiness, and how to âMake Him Want You.â The paintings comment, almost philosophically, on the light summer frocks, displayed on mannequins placed before them. But the message is lightened by images of comic book personages with which everyone was familiar. Who, pausing to look at the display, would have predicted that
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would find its way to Berlinâs National Gallery by way of the museum at Monchengladbach and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art? If such unpromising images can become fine art, there is comparable hope for the hardly more promising rest of us!
Of the two Coca-Cola bottles, done approximately two years apart, only the later one shows us what we are, according to Andyâs mentor, Emile de Antonio.
(left)
Andy Warhol,
Large Coca-Cola
, c. 1962. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 85 à 57 in. © Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY;
(right)
Andy Warhol,
Coca-Cola
, 1961. Casein and crayon on linen, 69 ½ à 52 ¼ in. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY
Years later, in the early 1980s, Warhol offered
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to a Dr. Marx, a prominent German collector of contemporary art, through Heiner Bastien, a German curator who regarded Warhol as a great artist. According to Bastien, âWe considered him generous to Marx because he pulled out all his old paintings. In the end he even pulled out his âAdvertisement,â because I said it would be wonderful to have this first painting in the collection. I donât think we are yet capable of understanding how radical what Andy did really was. He has probably drawn a picture of our times that reflects more about our time than any other art. It seems as if he had some sort of instinctual understanding of where our civilization is going toâ (Bockris, 435).
Andyâs first show, held in the windows of Bonwit Teller in New York in April 1961, reveals his feeling for the human condition. Photograph by Nathan Gluck
What almost nobody in 1961 would have seen, had they passed the window at Bonwit Teller, is that it was full of art. They thought they were looking at womenâs wear, with some vernacular images taken from the culture by some imaginative, in all likelihood gay, window dresser. Who could have seen it as art in that year?Not me, for sure. Not most of the art world, then still caught up with Abstract Expressionism. It would not have been until 1962 that I was aware of Pop from an illustration in
ARTnews
, showing what looked like a panel from an action comic, like
Steve Canyon
, showing a pilot and his girl kissing, and titled
The Kiss.
Lichtenstein would have seen it as art, as would Ivan Karp. So would de Antonio and Henry Geldzahler, the young curator of Modern American Art at the Metropolitan Museum. A few dealers, a few collectors.
What made it art, then? Warhol would certainly have been unable to explain. He affected a certain inarticulateness, stumbling and mumbling. It could not have lain in the difference in size between the advertisements as they appear in the newspapers and as they appear on the large panels Warhol used for the window at Bonwit Teller. One can imagine
Before and After
postersize over the windows on subways or buses in New York, or even as rather dramatic billboards in Times Square. One of the Pop artists, James Rosenquist, actually worked for Artkraft Strauss sign corporation, painting giant billboards around the city. My view is that all the advertisements âappropriatedââthe term was not used in the 1960s, and when it did become a form preempting images, as it did in the 1980s, its meaning was entirely differentâhave something in common. They all refer, to use the title of Grace Paleyâs collection