NARRATOR:
Andy Warhol is credited as the artist who made these silk-screened wooden boxes. But in fact, he had no role in their actual physical creation. He came up with the idea of replicating boxes of everyday consumer goods in 1964, and displayed 400 such boxes in a New York gallery. Five years later, when he was preparing for a retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum—now the Norton Simon Museum—he contacted a local printer and ordered 100 copies to look just like the New York set. So these particular boxes are replicas of the so-called “originals”—that were themselves faithful copies of readily available household products.
Warhol is considered by many as the quintessential Pop artist. Pop Art began in England in the 1950s, and flourished in the United States in the 1960s. The style derived its name from its subject, popular culture. Works like "Brillo Boxes" perfectly illustrate Pop Art’s key themes—consumerism, banality and advertising—as well as its emphasis on mechanized production. Warhol took the Pop Art aesthetic a step further by purposely disengaging himself from the actual making of art. He once told a critic that he thought somebody else should be able to do all his paintings for him. Warhol also sought to remove the distinction between what we think of as “fine art”—things we find in museums crafted by an individual, identifiable artist—and the wide variety of mass-produced anonymous visual culture we’re exposed to every day.
Brillo Boxes
1969 version of 1964 original
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Not on View
Andy Warhol was one of the most important figures in the first generation of Pop artists. Born in Pittsburgh, he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. After graduating, he moved to New York to pursue magazine illustration and advertising. His talents put him in high demand among advertising firms and publications. Soon he discovered the world of fine art, where his aptitude and eye for design translated well. The marriage of these two realms resulted in Warhol’s consummate trademark style, with the artist often taking a “hands-off” approach at his art “Factory” by having silkscreens produced under his direction.
Here, the multitude of boxes alludes to the abundance of seriality, as though more exist outside of this gallery. In fact, these Brillo Boxes are 1969 replicas of versions made in 1964. One hundred Brillo Boxes were fabricated by Warhol specifically for the 1970 exhibition that inaugurated the newly built Pasadena Art Museum at Orange Grove and Colorado Boulevards, which five years later became the Norton Simon Museum.
Both modular and as a whole, these boxes appear to contribute to a larger continuum. Warhol selected an object that already existed as a manufactured multiple—a case of Brillo-brand soap pads—and continued to add to the scale of their production by producing his own soap pad cases while the Brillo company was simultaneously manufacturing theirs.
Details
- Artist Name: Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
- Title: Brillo Boxes
- Date: 1969 version of 1964 original
- Medium: Acrylic silkscreen on wood
- Dimensions: Each box: 20 x 20 x 17 in. (50.8 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, Gift of the Artist
- Accession Number: P.1969.144.001-100
- Copyright: © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object Information
Andy Warhol, gift 1969 to;
Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, 1969-1975;
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, 1969-1975;
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
Andy Warhol - From A to B and Back Again
- Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018-11-12 to 2019-03-31
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019-05-18 to 2019-09-02
- Art Institute of Chicago, 2019-10-20 to 2020-01-26
- Bastian, Heiner, Andy Warhol Retrospektive,fig. 162 pp. 32, 220 - 221
- Coplans, John, Serial Imagery, p. 130
- Bastain, Heiner, Andy Warhol Retrospective,fig. 162 pp. 32, 220 - 221
- 3 Pop Artists,
- Bastian, Heiner, Retrospective Andy Warhol,fig. 162 pp. 218, 220-221, 311
- Art Gallery of New South Wales, Pop Art: 1955-1970, p. 94
- Global Village: The 60s,fig. 2 (detail), no. 215 pp. 70-70, 88
- Craft, Catherine, The Burlington Magazine, p. 250
- Armory Center for the Arts/Art Center College of Design, Radical Past: Contemporary Art & Music in Pasadena, 1960-1974, p. 86
- Horlock, Mary, Modern Artists - Julian Opie,2004, p. 9, fig. [4]
- The Contemporary, p. 3
- Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections 1956-1966,no. 34 p. 178
- The Tate Gallery, Warhol, p. 85
- The Contemporary, p. 14
Additional Artwork by Artist
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