Andy Warhol

Private Collection, Switzerland
Sale: New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co., Contemporary Art, 5 April 1978, Lot 232
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), Orlando 1975, pp.100-101

As the original study for Coca-Cola, 1962, the present work is the extant chronicle of the genesis of American Pop Art. It is both an exquisite drawing and historic artefact that records the poised moment when Pop fully evolved and started fundamentally to affect an entire generation. If Andy Warhol is considered the progenitor of American Pop, Coca-Cola can be seen as the seed of the movement that revolutionised contemporary art practice. Executed in 1962, the present drawing shows the artist's first experiments with the ideas that would occupy him for the rest of his career. It is one of the earliest recorded drawings in the catalogue raisonné, identified by Georg Frei and Neil Printz as the preparatory study for the Coca-Cola painting executed between May and June 1962 and over two metres tall (Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1, Paintings and Sculptures 1961-1963, London and New York 2002, p. 192). Indeed, it is the only drawing for the ensuing series of multiple Coca-Colas, a defining body of work within the artist's oeuvre.

Warhol's flagrant appropriation of the instantly familiar Coca-Cola branding signifies an innovative mode of ultimately accessible visual communication. The direct insertion of such ubiquitous consumer imagery into an artwork typifies the subversive cause of Pop and undermined Modernism's epic quest to assert universal truth. Coca-Cola is one of the earliest incarnations of this insurrection, which in turn precipitated the ironic subversion of Postmodernism.

The source for this work was an advertisement in the Byzantine Catholic World, which was most probably read by Warhol's religious mother as it was the official newspaper for the Byzantine Catholic Metropolitan Church in her hometown of Pittsburgh. Three of the four hand-painted Coca-Cola works of 1961 and 1962 relied on this source, the other stemming from an earlier advert where the bottle appeared beside a separate, circular logo.

Compositional balance is paramount in this serene drawing. Although Warhol probably traced the bottle and text from a projection, the pictorial disposition is off kilter and the bottom third of the page remains empty. This is a unique composition for a Coca-Cola work. It is also revealing to note Warhol's omissions from the source advert: he has not included any of the auxiliary text, or the line that indicates the liquid level in the bottle, although he has scribed the patent description beneath the lettering. After studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Warhol had moved to New York in 1949 and pursued a successful career in magazine illustration and advertising. Evidently the former commercial illustrator was keenly drawn to emblematic design and compositional arrangement rather than the prosaic vehicle of small-print.

Warhol was obsessed with the power of brands and the Coke bottle enshrined the totemic design of exploding mass culture in the 1950s and '60s. Frequently cited as the world's most recognizable brand, Coca-Cola's bottle shape, typeface and graphic schema are so immediately renowned that labelling and product have become inseparably fused in the global psyche. In 1962 Gene Swenson commented on Warhol's manipulation of this effect when describing his work: "Our awareness is not so much of a Coca-Cola billboard as of the shrunken world we occupy; an image from a sign never intended to be so consciously seen in focus is stripped of its original signification. Far from symbolizing a civilization, the image loses even its ability to symbolize a product. It signifies a specific common object; the shape and color of its presentation characterize an attitude towards objects to which we seldom pay conscious attention, but which make up the preconceptions of our everyday visual experience" (Gene Swenson, Art News, September 1962).

The present work's execution was contemporaneous with Warhol's conversion from block printing to screen printing, which ushered in a new, pre-eminent era of Pop. This drawing has been cited as the preparatory drawing for Warhol's fourth Coca-Cola painting, executed between May and June 1962. In the third and fourth paintings, the abbreviation of "Registered in U.S. Patent Office", "REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.", appears beneath the Coca-Cola lettering (see fig. ). However, in this drawing the final "F" and the following dot have been merged to produce "REG. U.S. PAT. OFR". Due to the inconsistent ink and rough printing process on newspaper of the original advert, Warhol's misreading is easily understandable. However, it seems unlikely that he made this error after having already painted the correct abbreviation earlier the same year. Therefore it seems possible that this work actually predates both the fourth and the third Coca-Cola paintings, and was executed right at the start of 1962. That would mean that it coincided with Warhol's first use of the silkscreen with the Dollar series, executed in early 1962. Thus while capturing the spirit of a cultural epoch and providing the inception of hand-painted masterworks, this Coca-Cola drawing also exactly paralleled the technical metamorphosis that revolutionised Warhol's oeuvre.