Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962

Michael Lobel: What we're looking at here is an early silkscreen painting by Andy Warhol. It's titled Green Coca-Cola Bottles, and Warhol made this painting in the summer of 1962. 

Narrator: Michael Lobel is Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Michael Lobel: Prior to Warhol's use of the silkscreen technique to make paintings, silkscreening had basically been a commercial technique.

Narrator: Warhol screened each bottle one at a time, deliberately making each different from the next. If you focus on the overall visual patterning, it almost reads as an abstract painting. Warhol was very ambitious—he wanted his art to be taken seriously, and abstraction dominated the art world at the time. But he also wanted the work to be perceived as radical and provocative. 

Michael Lobel: He did leave a band of space at the bottom of the painting, and as you'll see, within that band he placed the logo of Coca-Cola. And for me, that's interesting because usually the bottom of a canvas is where we expect to find an artist's signature. 

And I think this tells us a lot about how Warhol was thinking about his own relationship to these images, and that as an artist in the age of mass media, as an artist immersed in consumer culture, it might make sense for him to remove his signature and replace it with a common product logo.

Narrator: In the next gallery, we’ll step back in time to the 1950s, when Warhol was working as a commercial illustrator—an experience that deeply informed his development of the Pop art style on view in this room.