How the life of Andy Warhol influenced pop art; On August the 6th, 1928, …show more content…
The large painting of 210.20cm tall by 145.10cm wide sits in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, United States. The painting was purchased with funds from the friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, but no price is given. The accession number is 68.25. The painting depicts 112 clear, empty glass Coca-Cola bottles in 7 rows and 16 columns (Boodram, n.d.). The medium used for this piece was acrylic paint with the addition of screen paint and a graphite pencil on a plane white canvas (Whitney Museum of American art, n.d.). Only two colours are used, red for the Coca-Cola logo at the bottom centre of the canvas and various shades of green for the Coca-Cola bottles (Boodram, n.d.). Additionally, black was also used for the outlines found printed over the bottles and Warhol did this using a single carved woodblock stamp (Whitney Museum of American art, n.d.). The year that this piece was created was also the year that Warhol had established his silkscreen printing technique, something that he favoured when working with pop art as it gave him the ability to produce paintings in an almost mechanical way, with near perfectly identical duplicates (Whitney Museum of American art, n.d.; Wolf, n.d.). The grid-like pattern would seem hypnotizing but in spite of this, the various shades of green used for the Coca-Cola bottles alongside the …show more content…
This quantity of product is the first theme of the painting, mass production and consumerism. Andy Warhol painted such a large piece covered completely in Coca-Cola bottles because Coca-Cola is an icon, an icon of mass production and of consumerism culture (Kleiner, 2009). The “omnipresence” of Coca-Cola in America and now the whole world is amazing. So absorbed was Warhol with the idea and culture of mass production that he named his studio “the Factory” (Kleiner, 2009, p. 984). The following quote from both Whitney Museum of American Art, (n.d.) and Kleiner, (2009) gives Warhol’s thoughts on American society and