Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola [3]

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, looking at a large painting from 1962 called “Coca-Cola [3] “.

Alejo Benedetti: [0:14] This is Andy Warhol’s moment. This is him thinking, “I want to do a painting of something that stands in for who we are as Americans,” and there’s no bigger icon than Coca-Cola.

Dr. Zucker: [0:24] It is big. It’s about six feet tall. It’s the size of a full-length portrait of George Washington. Although this is painted with a brush by hand, it’s not painted the way that an 18th-century portrait would be painted. It’s painted in an incredibly flat way, as if to mimic the process of printing.

Alejo: [0:43] It’s all about the removal of the artist’s hand. It’s not about making this beautiful painting in the traditional sense.

Dr. Zucker: [0:50] Art had always been about the exceptional. Art had always been about the unique. Here, Warhol has flipped that on its head and is painting the most ordinary.

Alejo: [1:00] This is what excited him, this idea that the everyday is exceptional. And so he turns to the most iconic thing and paints it in a way that removes the artist’s hand, makes it seem very ordinary. In doing that, he’s also making it tremendously accessible.

Dr. Zucker: [1:16] And democratic. This is an art that is in everybody’s experience. There is nothing rare here. We’ve all held a Coke bottle. We’ve all heard the sound when you pop the top of a Coke bottle. You can hear the bubbles. This is doing what advertising does, but it’s relocated it into the intellectual realm of art and art history.

Alejo: [1:35] It’s so accessible to everyone. That is why it’s powerful. That is why he gravitated towards it.

Dr. Zucker: [1:41] “No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy a better Coke. Your Coke is the same Coke as Liz Taylor’s. Your Coke is the same Coke as the bum on the corner.” He’s taking a subject that is of our everyday experience, and he’s putting it on canvas. He’s putting it within a frame.

[1:58] He’s asking us to look at it differently, even though the bottle itself, its shape, its lines, its forms are things that we’re completely familiar with.

Alejo: [2:07] This is a pivotal moment. He’s just ended his career as a commercial artist, doing illustrations for fashion and for other advertisements. He decides he wants to operate in the fine art world. For him, that’s this huge transition. The way that he’s going to do it is by exploring these iconic symbols and iconic brands.

[2:27] In 1961, 1962, he does a series of Coke bottles. This is number three. The first two were very abstract, very gestural. You see the artist’s hand. This is the moment when Andy Warhol becomes the Warhol that we know.

Dr. Zucker: [2:40] That’s because he had gotten rid of the handmade. He had gotten rid of the painterly, process-oriented canvas. He’s showing us here a painting that seems as if it had been printed by a machine. So we’re not looking at a representation of a Coke bottle. We’re looking at a representation of an ad for a Coke bottle that has within it its own representation of a Coke bottle.

Alejo: [3:01] This is also one of the first works that he’s done in that vein, and so it’s not perfect. If you look at it, you can see moments where he’s made a little mistake. He goes back in, and he covers it up with some paint.

[3:13] Then, down at the very bottom, you can see there are little drips of paint. That’s something that, later on, as he moves into a mechanical process using screen printing, the signs of the artist’s hand, that goes away. But then that also makes it more democratic.

Dr. Zucker: [3:27] Warhol was not the first artist to use Coke bottles in his art. Robert Rauschenberg had done it a few years earlier. In fact, by 1962, by the time this painting was made, Warhol had purchased a Rauschenberg. This is an artist who is knowledgeable about new directions in American art.

Alejo: [3:42] This is the late ’50s. This is the early ’60s. There’s this culture of excess. There’s so much stuff around. Naturally, artists are going to look at what’s around them.

Dr. Zucker: [3:53] Warhol is creating an art that is celebrating consumer culture, that is representing the visual stimulus that people are receiving constantly in their daily lives. Every time you open a magazine, see an advertisement in a bus or a subway or on a billboard, Coca-Cola is there.

Alejo: [4:09] It’s so ever-present. This idea of branding and creating a symbol, and the power of a symbol becomes essential to his work, and so much to the point that he himself becomes the Andy Warhol brand. We immediately understand that shock of crazy hair.

Dr. Zucker: [4:24] Creating a cult of fame, creating a performance art out of fame itself. Art had for so long been about beauty. It had been about creating with fine craftsmanship, the complexity of the human body. Here, it feels absurdly flat, as if it’s not only the canvas surface that’s two-dimensional, but the subject itself is two-dimensional.

Alejo: [4:45] There’s some folks who feel it needs to be amazingly done. That technical skill needs to be outstanding for it to be a good work of art or a powerful work of art. Part of the conversation that we can have about a work like this is that what he’s doing is smart. What he’s doing has all of this potency of powerful ideas.

[5:03] It’s less about how perfectly he can put it onto canvas. It’s more about all the other conversations that are had as a result of that.

[5:11] [music]

Learn more about this work from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Read about the rise of the suburbs and consumer culture in the years after World War II

What was the Consumer Era?

Find out how consumerism helped shaped American identities in the 1950s

Learn more about Pop Art from Tate, MoMA, and DPLA

More Smarthistory images...

Key points

• Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, increased factory production and economic prosperity in the United States contributed to a rise in consumer culture dominated by recognizable product brands and iconic advertising images popularized through mass media.
• The widespread appeal of products like Coca-Cola suggested an ideal of American democracy where individuals shared common experiences, regardless of class or social difference.
• By imitating the style and commercial technique of mass advertising, Pop Art rejected an emphasis on the skill of the artist.
• Warhol replaced art’s traditional subject matter with images of everyday, mass produced objects.

Many post-war artists turned to the “everyday” as an antidote to capitalist conformism—as a field of spontaneity, serendipity, and freedom. But others wondered whether the American everyday had not, in fact, already been thoroughly saturated by corporate media. By the early 1960s, the post-war economic boom had progressed to the point where its commercial effects had permeated the everyday landscape with standardized objects, architectures, and media-dizzying arrangements of billboards, subway advertisements, tabloids, comic books, movie posters, and supermarket signs—and the din of televisions and radios. What would happen to the critical function of art if it were to expand so far as to include not only (to quote [Allan] Kaprow) “the odor of crushed strawberries” but also “a billboard selling Drano”? Would art simply collapse into advertising? Would commodities be reclassified as art?

From Angela L. Miller, Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Washington University Libraries, 2018), p. 592. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

More to think about

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a dramatic increase in consumer culture and advertising imagery. Warhol’s Coca-Cola [3] incorporates both the subject and the style of these new images, but is this painting critical or celebratory of this “culture of excess”? What are the arguments for both positions?