Andy Warhol

Suzanne Moss, New York
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1988

New York, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Andy, February - March 1989
Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Andy Warhol: A Factory, October 1998 - September 1999, p. 185, illustrated in color
Milan, Triennale di Milano, The Andy Warhol Show, September 2004 - January 2005, cat. no. 125, p. 206, illustrated in color (as Brillo Painting)

Exh. Cat., Monaco, Grimaldi Forum Monaco, SuperWarhol, 2003, cat. no. 106, p. 21, illustrated in color (as Brillo Painting)
Georg Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, 1964-1969, Vol. 02A, New York, 2004, cat. no. 582, p. 60, illustrated in color

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The mid-twentieth century phenomenon of Pop Art unequivocally revolutionized art’s purview by challenging traditional subject matter and giving artistic form to the pillars of modern consumer society: news, celebrity, advertising, and products.  As the undoubted master and pioneer of this movement, Andy Warhol deftly traversed all four of these image fields with his legendary silkscreen paintings. With his background as a commercial illustrator, Warhol’s unique attention to branded products rendered him the supreme commander of this field of Pop Art’s lexicon. Within the consumer society that Pop Art aimed to immortalize, the areas of advertising and products are most firmly supported by one crucial visual signifier: the logo. As homage to the undeniable graphic impact of the logo for the common household product of Brillo soap pads, Warhol’s vibrant Brillo Painting (3 ₵ Off) takes the idea of the logo as a point of aesthetic analysis, and places the Brillo brand among one of the artist’s most ubiquitous symbols of consumerism within his oeuvre.

Created in 1964 the present work stems from a key point in Warhol’s career which heralded a period of great commercial success, increasing fame, and a solidification of his most important image subjects. Warhol exhibited his adoption of this motif on replicated packaging boxes, along with Heinz tomato ketchup, at his first sculpture exhibition that opened on 21 April 1964 at the Stable Gallery in New York.  Marking an ambitious turn in Warhol’s career the designs used on the box sculptures were the first in a series of works that have become influential totems of pop imagery ever since, with their distinctive penchant for formal repetition and serialization. As Georg Frei and Neil Printz 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)

On the same night of the Stable Gallery opening, 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 present work by the artist, constructed by stretching the extra fabric to a totemic stretcher. While Warhol executed a number of Brillo box sculptures, the artist made only two Brillo paintings—the present work and a far smaller, 15 by 28 ½ inch version. The inimitable and extraordinarily rare 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.

Much like the artist’s earlier Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, the Brillo Boxes turn the analytical eye of art toward the superfluous repetition of branded and shelved products that consumers are exposed to, questioning the lines between brands and icons. Warhol would make several other box sculptures using the branding of other ubiquitous mass-produced American household consumables such as corn flakes, tomato juice, and peach halves. With the reconfiguration of these quotidian consumer signifiers to the fine art setting, Warhol makes icons of the everyday items.  Of all the brands Warhol appropriated, it is undoubtedly the disproportionate attention that he gave to the Brillo soap pad logo from the very beginning that cemented them as his most iconic brand-based works, next to the Campbell's Soup Can. 

The present work is a stunning example of Warhol’s utilization of the motif, exploiting it for all of its graphic power to create a vibrantly impactful surface. In his use of the recognizable graphics, Warhol extends upon Marcel Duchamp’s legacy of the readymade and prefigures post-modern tendencies toward sampling and remixing cultural signifiers for his own aesthetic ends. His adaptation of consumer imagery was shared by a contemporaneous colleague of American Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein.  Here Warhol carefully selected a particular Brillo box design that focuses on the “3 ₵ Off” graphic; a metaphoric nod to the relentless marketing of products that such striking logo designs seek to serve in an effort to appear distinguishable on supermarket shelves, as well as the artist's obsession with money. This draws a link to Lichtenstein’s 10₵ painting which displays a price dislocated from an actual product. Similarly Warhol enters into a dialogue with Claes Oldenburg who in 1961 opened a store in the Lower East Side of Manhattan selling sculptures in the form of commonplace consumer objects, such as ice cream, oranges, cigarettes, hats, and shoes. All these artists expounded the collapsing of high art and mass culture crucial to the Pop Art revolution. Whilst they all shared concerns for consumer culture, undoubtedly it is Warhol who holds the specific regard for the iconicity of real brands.

Throughout the 1960s, Warhol’s Brillo boxes became a central constituent of major exhibitions across the world including: the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; 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. With such continual institutional recognition, Warhol’s significant Brillo Painting (3 ₵ Off) remains a true Pop Art icon.