Andy Warhol

Clerestorey, Philadelphia
Joel Podell
Bonnie Cunningham Wallace and David Alan Wallace/Sandra and John A. Swartz
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in May 2003

Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, 1964-1969, Vol. 02A, New York, 2004, cat. no. 583, p. 60, illustrated in color

Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at (212) 606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This canvas is framed in a brown wood frame with a 1 inch float.
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On April 21, 1964, the Stable Gallery in New York opened an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s box sculptures, a series that was one of the artist’s most ambitious undertakings of the period, and has come to represent a motif that is synonymous with Warhol and the Pop Art movement in the early 1960s. On the same night, the artist hosted a party at his now legendary Factory studio at 231 East 47^th Street. Two of his friends, Sarah Dalton and Suzanne Moss, wore dresses they had created from fabric that Warhol had printed with his iconic silkscreens. Dalton’s dress was printed in a repeating pattern, using a small screen from 1962, Fragile – Handle with Care. Moss was instructed to purchase fabric in either white or yellow; she chose yellow and Warhol selected the screen for his Brillo (3₵ Off) boxes, making adjacent impressions of the front and the narrower side face of the fabric so that once sewn the dress would be box-like in construction, with four sides. Moss was given the extra fabric as a painting. Brillo Painting (3₵ Off), therefore, from its very inception has been imbued with the essential spirit of Warhol’s revolutionary practice and singular aesthetic vision.

Warhol’s Brillo (3₵ Off) box sculptures were the first in a series of significant Brillo box works that, along with the artist’s earlier Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, his iconic investigations into celebrity and death in the Liz, Marilyn, and Jackie canvases, and his renowned cycle of Self-Portraits, have become omnipresent totems of Pop. Indeed, throughout the decade in which they were created, Warhol’s Brillo boxes became a central constituent of major exhibitions, from Moderna Museet in Stockholm; to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Kunsthalle in Bern; Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo; the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Pasadena Art Museum. The conceptual genesis for a box sculpture series was rooted in Warhol’s 1962 creation of a three-dimensional version of the Campbell’s Soup Can, and Brillo Painting (3₵ Off) is the perfect continuation of Warhol’s appropriation of commercial products and advertising design. Moreover, the inception of the Brillo box series precipitated new working methods in Warhol’s Factory, and a wider reassessment of accepted traditions of artistic practice. The artist first unveiled his sculpted series at the Stable Gallery between April and May of 1964 and, as Georg Frei and Neil Printz have noted, “The Stable installation vividly demonstrates the radical character of the transformation in Warhol’s work at the beginning of 1964. Painted compositions cede at this time to serial accumulations of objects, whose quantity and likeness undermine conventional orders of number, composition, and visual distinction.” (Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1964-1969, Vol. 02A, New York, 2004, p. 55) Thus, from its storied place at the genesis of a turning point for a groundbreaking movement of twentieth-century art, Brillo (3₵ Off) stands as a testament to a key revolution that took place in modes of artistic creation with profoundly influential effects on perceptions of artistic authorship and indeed the very nature of the authentic art object.