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Originally Posted by Tokolosh
Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?
Andy Warhol, 1963
Pop artists painted pictures of things that anyone walking along Broadway could recognize in a split second - comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles - all great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.
Andy Warhol, 1980
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Andy wanted to be an abstract expressionist, but he also wanted to bring objects into the non-objective plane. He didn't agree that abstract expressionism had to be non-objective as an absolute rule. The abexers didn't want him around though. More importantly, when he started to do "fine" work, the very first canvas he created was a single Coca-Cola bottle with some free brushwork & drips.
Henry Geldzahler, the critic & Met sugar daddy, saw this earliest painting & told Andy it sucked. Andy didn't listen entirely & kept on doing a pop/abex style with paintings from comic strips like Popeye, Dick Tracy, Superman & Batman which included freebrushwork, lots of empty space, compositional overpainting, & drips when they happened. To me, these early efforts are his all-time best works. They influenced Roy Lichtenstein or the other way around ---there's always been a debate...Andy's were in a display window before Lichtenstein though...that business is all besides the point.
The main point was that Andy eventually got the message that the AbExers were not going to allow an ex-commercial illustrator homosexual into their fold & so he started doing his own unique thing by taking the action out of the painting & doing Coke bottles with less drips, basically, and most importantly, by repeating the image of the Coke bottles. After all, what else is one going to fill the canvas with if a Coke bottle is the subject other than other Coke bottles? As Andy remarked, "if one were the Queen of England then you couldn't get a better Coke than anyone else," & this was an aspect of consumer culture that fascinated him.
The Campbell's Soup Cans were next, many of which are lesser known works that also contained abex-like experimental coloring & drips, but he had to show them in L.A. due to an increasingly hostile environment in NYC to his work & so that he could meet an elder Marcel Duchamp who was having a retrospective at the Pasedena Museum of Fine Art out there & who would undoubtably understand what he was doing. He got shit there too, but eventually things worked out his way. Why? Sheer persistence &, as has been remarked, one cannot look at a Warhol (art done with a minimal amount of thought) without thinking. Right after the soup and silver balloons, Warhol employed Malanga & went to silkscreening (in many cases, censored) Associated Press pictures of death & disaster for that series, and those are also among his very best works.