Brillo box

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brillo Box
(external web link ! )

Andy Warhol , 1964
screen print on acrylic on wood
43.5 × 43.5 × 35.6 cm

Brillo Box (Soap Pads) (Brillo-Karton (Putzkissen)) is an art object by the American pop art artist Andy Warhol from 1964.

description

The object consists of a wooden box primed with white acrylic paint , which is printed in two colors (blue and red) using a screen printing stencil with the slightly curved company logo “New! Brillo ® “is printed. In addition to the Brillo logo are on all four sides, and on the cover in capitals set Description "24 GIANT SIZE PKGS." Lowercase "soap pads" and again in capital letters "WITH RUST Resister"; The front and back are also marked with the slogan “SHINES ALUMINUM FAST” and on the two shorter side panels with the manufacturer's address “Brillo Mfg. Co., Inc. Brooklyn, NY ”. The original Brillo box measures 43.5 × 43.5 × 35.6 cm (the dimensions of later replicas are different). "Brillo Pads" is the product name of a cleaning sponge made of steel wool by the Brillo Manufacturing Company in Brooklyn, patented in 1913 under the trademark "Brillo" .

Similar objects from this series of works are the Campbell's Box (Tomato Juice) , the Del Monte Box (Peach Halves) (Del Monte Karton (peach halves)) and the Heinz Box (Tomato Ketchup) , which were created at the same time .

The boxes were presented in Warhol's second exhibition at the Stable Gallery by Eleanor Ward in New York on April 21, 1964, in which only trompe l'oeil sculptures of food packaging were shown. For this purpose Warhol had taken over existing motifs from the world of goods in supermarkets and packaging design and now extended his concept of serial reproduction of advertising motifs , which he had previously worked through with the Campbells soup serigraphs , to the third dimension.

background

For the templates, Warhol sent his colleague Gerard Malanga to a supermarket with the express instruction that he should bring something "completely normal". Malanga brought along grocery cartons from Brillo, Mott's apple juice, Kellogg’s cornflakes, Del Monte peaches, Campbell’s tomato juice and Heinz ketchup.

A carpenter was then commissioned to make hundreds of wooden boxes that were supposed to correspond exactly to the dimensions of the cardboard models. Then the boxes - true to the template - were painted white, yellow or light brown with acrylic paint. Finally, Warhol and Malanga printed the boxes on all four sides and, if necessary, on the top and bottom. The graphic design of the original was copied down to the last detail. The finished objects could hardly be distinguished from the cardboard templates.

The box exhibition was a purely conceptual show: Warhol filled both rooms of the gallery with around 400 cardboard objects, some of which he had stacked in rows up to the ceiling. The entire gallery was reminiscent of the warehouse of a grocery wholesaler. The type of presentation was intended to show the visitors, and above all the art dealers, that they could buy Warhol's art in boxes or units. The guests at the vernissage , which took place on April 21, 1964, behaved accordingly amused : The visitors pushed their way through the narrow aisles of the cardboard stacks and felt like they were in the supermarket. Robert Indiana recalled: "The most spectacular vernissage of that time was definitely Andy's Brillo Box -Show, you could hardly get in [...] There was just enough space between the rows of boxes to squeeze through."

The exhibition of the Brillo boxes marked a turning point in Warhol's work in several respects: On the one hand, it appeared on the evening of the vernissage for the last time in the company of the other pop artists Roy Lichtenstein , Claes Oldenburg , James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann , and on the other hand, it opened again the exhibition opened his factory to the public for the first time and from then on only appeared surrounded by his so-called “Warhol entourage”.

The exhibition sparked a heated debate about the concept of art and reinforced Warhol's reputation as a controversial artist. A New York painter named James Harvey, who designed the original Brillo box in 1961, also spoke up. Harvey was an Abstract Expressionist , of his art with commercial art funded Jobs To. It hit the painter all the harder that his designs, which he himself had regarded as “non-art”, were now simply declared as art by Warhol and marketed accordingly.

Shortly after the exhibition, Warhol separated from the exhibition organizer Eleanor Ward and switched to Leo Castelli .

Considerations

With his Brillo boxes there is a degree of removal from actual boxes and they become an object that is not really a box. In a sense they are an illusion of a box and that places them in the realm of art.

- Claes Oldenburg

In relation to the sensation that the box show caused, the commercial success was relatively small, although the boxes were offered at moderate prices of 200 to 400 dollars. The gallery owner Eleanor Ward classified Warhol's boxes as "difficult to sell". She recalled: “Warhol believed that anyone who came here would buy one straight away, he really believed that. We pictured people walking down Madison Avenue with Campbell's soup boxes under their arms, but we never saw any. "

The painter and art critic Sidney Tillim discussed the exhibition in Arts Magazine at the time and described the show as “an ideological tour de force , the nihilistic basic trait of which is concealed by the commodity character of the exhibited [...] The preoccupation with the quantitative is a protection against the spatial, by refusing to conclude that something in the room is important [...] the decision not to decide anything is a paradox, comparable to an idea that expresses nothing but then gives shape to this nothing. The visual emptiness that emanates from all of this is the price Warhol is apparently willing to pay for a moment of sublime, but compulsive negation. "

For Warhol's box exhibition, a comparison was quickly made with the ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp , also industrially produced objects that expressed that art did not need to be handcraft, but could result from the everyday and found. In Duchamp's sense, Warhol's box exhibition was also intended as a provocation, which raised the question of whether Warhol's art became art simply because he exhibited it in a gallery.

In contrast to Duchamp's ready-mades, however, Warhol's boxes are hand-made imitations of the mass-produced products that Duchamp elevated to works of art. David Bourdon : "Warhol's boxes paved the way for the sculptures of Minimal Art , because afterwards it became common practice for artists to have their works produced industrially and in series."

Art critic Arthur C. Danto saw Warhol's Brillo Box exhibition as a “key experience in revolutionizing the whole of art theory: Warhol and other Pop Art artists had shown that of two objects that looked exactly the same, one was a work of art and the other couldn't be. "

Fakes

In 1968 the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, under the direction of Pontus Hultén , showed the world's first major Warhol retrospective . The extensive show should also include Brillo boxes. For reasons of cost, however, Warhol's original wooden boxes were not sent to Sweden, but five hundred foldable cardboard boxes from the Brillo factory in Brooklyn. When asked, Hultén later recalled, Warhol only responded with “Why don't you make them there?” And thus indirectly gave his consent to have more boxes produced in Sweden. So Hultén also had an estimated one hundred wooden boxes made in Sweden, which were placed in the entrance area of ​​the museum. After the exhibition, Warhol gave him the boxes. In Warhol's catalog raisonné, 94 wooden boxes from 1968 were listed as "Stockholm type", which differ from the originals in that they are made of fibreboard instead of plywood and the background is not painted but printed on; the design also includes the addition “Pad Giant” above the Brillo “O”.

In 2007, the Swedish daily Expressen discovered that some of Warhol's Brillo boxes were counterfeit and were probably not made until 1990, three years after Warhol's death. About 100 of these fakes are said to be in circulation on the art market. Pontus Hultén himself is said to have commissioned the unauthorized plagiarism from a workshop in Malmö in 1990, in order to show them in St. Petersburg and in the Danish Louisiana Museum of Modern Art that same year . In 1995 Hultén gave the Moderna Museet six Brillo boxes, the provenance of which was unclear. In 2004 the London art dealer Brian Balfour-Oates bought 22 boxes from Hultén, which were verified as genuine by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board . More boxes have meanwhile been circulating on the international art market. The expert commission of the Authentication Board itself, however, came under fire because fake boxes may have been included in the catalog raisonné.

The Stockholm boxes fetch a maximum of about 200,000 US dollars at auctions at the present time, while a single original from 1964 was auctioned at Christie's in New York in November 2006 for 710,000 US dollars. To this day, the Brillo boxes of the “Stockholm type” from 1968 are considered a risk investment on the art market. Kasper König , who initiated the 1968 Warhol retrospective at the time, rehabilitated Pontus Hultén, who died in 2006, by pointing out that he could not imagine that Hultén had the boxes made with the intention of selling them, “he has probably had them made for the exhibition in St. Petersburg, after that they would have been in his house in France with coffee stains on them, and finally someone probably asked him if they could be bought. I'm sorry that he got into strange waters afterwards, but that was definitely not his intention. "

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b David Bourdon: Warhol , p. 187
  2. ^ Victor Bockris: Andy Warhol . Claassen, Düsseldorf, 1989, ISBN 3-546-41393-8 , pp. 200f
  3. ↑ a b The end of what? Michael Lüthy Archive, accessed December 29, 2008 .
  4. ↑ a b c David Bourdon: Warhol , pp. 182-185
  5. ↑ from Michael Hauskeller: Arthur C. Danto. What is art Positions of aesthetics from Plato to Danto  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Munich 2005, pp. 99-104. PDF. Retrieved December 29, 2008.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / homepages.uni-paderborn.de  
  6. ↑ Lisa Zeitz: Comment: What happened to Warhol. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . September 1, 2007, accessed May 31, 2013 .
!Externally linked image material is protected by copyright and is not subject to the GNU FDL