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Andy Warhol’s transformation of familiar products into works of art developed from his artistic origins as an illustrator for fashion brands and magazines. After graduating in 1949 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in Pictorial Design, Warhol moved to New York to pursue a career as a commercial artist. His illustrations for shoe advertisements – in particular those created for I. Miller, the premier shoe emporium of the time – established his reputation.

Warhol experienced much success in the field of illustration, with his designs being featured in major publications such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. However, by the 1960s he began to transform the imagery of everyday products into works of art in their own right. His breakthrough exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles consisted of 32 paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans, marking his transition into the realm of contemporary art. In the following decades, as a pioneer of the Pop art movement he reimagined the possibilities of paintings and prints.

‘When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums where images of mass advertising and popular culture that everyone can recognise are a form of art.’

Andy Warhol

The appropriation of striking logos and the familiar visual language of advertising recalls Warhol’s earlier iconic works depicting Brillo boxes, Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. For Warhol, despite being the products of capitalism, these brands could be a leveller for society. The artist observed:

‘What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.’

Warhol’s cultivation of a distinctive personal brand and the rise of Pop art were a reaction to the dominant artistic movement of the time: Abstract Expressionism, which focused on spontaneous gestures and an expressive approach to painting. By appropriating and repeating the imagery of everyday products, Warhol’s Ads elevated the ubiquitous advertising material of the 20^th century into vibrant works of art.

‘The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognise in a split second – comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles —all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.’

Andy Warhol

Some of the key symbols in these iconic advertising campaigns have shaped the collective consciousness for millennia, being prevalent in great works of art and literature. For instance, the Pegasus motif in the Mobilgas logo originates from Greek mythology, being emblematic of fame and artistic inspiration (rather aptly, for Warhol), while the Apple ad features the Biblical symbol of original sin and temptation which is loaded with subliminal associations. The inclusion of the Apple ad in this series was no coincidence:  less than a year prior to conceiving the Ads, Warhol had encountered a young Steve Jobs in Yoko Ono’s New York apartment. This exchange between two of the most famous innovators of 20^th century culture was captured in Warhol’s diaries:

‘[Jobs] gave me a lesson on drawing with [the Apple computer] … I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.’

(Andy Warhol, diary entry for Tuesday 9 October 1984).

The familiar faces featured in the Ads were also meaningful to Warhol as an extension of his portraits of Hollywood icons. The figure of James Dean, who died at the age of 24, embodies the twin themes of fame and tragedy in Warhol’s oeuvre, while the inclusion of the Blackglama ad reflects the artist’s lifelong reverence for Judy Garland. Her performance as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz made an impression onthe young Warhol, who would write fan letters to the actress. After becoming acquainted with Garland as an adult and befriending her daughter Liza Minnelli, he described her as ‘the greatest actress you could imagine every second of her life.’

The inclusion of the Paramount logo in Ads not only reflected Warhol’s love of cinema but also held deep personal significance. His partner of five years, Jon Gould, was an executive at Paramount Pictures and there are many references to their relationship in the artist’s diaries. Gould died of AIDS in 1986 at the age of 33, just months before Warhol’s own untimely death. Cataloguing moments in Warhol’s own life while simultaneously reflecting 20^th century history, the Ads are a kind of personal and cultural time capsule, foreshadowing the exponential growth of some of the world’s biggest brands.

Although Warhol’s printmaking practice centred around repetition as a reflection of mass consumption in Western society, he often created unique paintings in tandem with his editioned prints. His Ads series was conceived both as a portfolio of prints and as a set of ten paintings on canvas, each with a distinct colourway. These original paintings adhered to the silkscreening process traditionally used for commercial printing. The groundbreaking idea of transposing advertising imagery from printed magazines on to a canvas bridged the gap between commercial and fine art, challenging the traditional definition of a painting. Warhol’s Ads paintings and prints transformed the ephemeral and fleeting images of mass media into era-defining works of art: immortalising them for posterity.

‘He truly elevated commercial art to the status of fine art, blurring established frontiers between art, commerce and advertising, three worlds which hardly communicated prior to Warhol.’ 

Paul Maréchal, art historian

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