Verbal Description: Coca-Cola [2], 1961

Narrator: This canvas, which measures almost six feet tall and over four feet wide, represents an ad for Coca-Cola, featuring the image of a glass bottle rendered in black casein paint and crayon. 

The large, detailed bottle stands on our left, rising up from the bottom of the canvas. Covering the right-hand edge of the painting is a vertical field of abstract marks. Most of this area is filled in with patches of light black crayon markings, but the top features a more solid patch of heavy black paint. These markings could be seen as records of the work of the artist’s hand, and do not appear to represent anything. In fact, this abstract field cancels out the imagery, serving to obscure the Coca-Cola logo, so that only the first three letters are showing. And there are other areas where passages of abstraction seem to get in the way of the image. A smudge of  dry black paint marks the upper left hand corner, clouding the top of the glass bottle. Soon after making this work, Warhol committed to a more machine-like painting style—as in a hard-edged painting of a Coke bottle nearby.