“What made Andy’s boxes art, while their real‐life counterparts were simply utilitarian containers, with no claim to the status of art at all? The question What is art? had been part of philosophy since the time of Plato. But Andy forced us to rethink the question in an entirely new way.” (Arthur Danto, “The Brillo Box,” in Andy Warhol, Cambridge, 2010, p. 62)
Before Andy Warhol, the thought of creating, or even recognizing, as sculpture, something that resembled a cardboard carton used for shipping consumer goods, would have been inconceivable. Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s long-time assistant recounts, “Andy was fascinated by the shelves of foodstuffs in supermarkets and the repetitive, machine-like effect they created” (Gerard Malanga, Archiving Warhol: Writing and Photographs, New York, 2002, p. 94). Expanding the subject matter of his earlier Campbell’s Soup Can paintings into the sculptural realm, Warhol created wooden facsimiles of cartons of Brillo Soap Pads, Mott’s Apple Juice, Del Monte Peach Halves, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, and Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Warhol first exhibited his revolutionary series of box sculptures at Manhattan’s Stable Gallery in 1964. Massed floor to ceiling, the wooden sculptures transformed the exhibition space into, what appeared as, a supermarket stockroom. The dazzling show became a rallying point for both those for and against Pop art; as Robert Indiana remembers, “The most striking opening of that period was definitely Andy’s Brillo Box Show” (Robert Indiana, quoted in Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, Cambridge, 2003, p. 198).
The most iconic of the box sculptures, the Brillo Boxes came to represent a period of revolutionary transformation in Warhol’s oeuvre. The first body of work to come from his East 47th Street studio, the box sculptures were constructed by craftsmen to Warhol’s specifications; Warhol and his assistants then painted and silkscreened the wooden boxes with stencils taken from the original grocery cartons. This new process, suggestive of an assembly line, would come to define Warhol’s brand. The production of this seminal body of sculptures, with their sheer quantity and their typology as packages, provides a context in which Warhol’s legendary studio came to be known as The Factory. Eight years after the groundbreaking show at Stable Gallery, Warhol produced a new series of Brillo Boxes, known as the Pasadena-type boxes, a series in which the present lot belongs, for his retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum.