![]() Gopnik: Yeah, there’s a great quote from Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol’s colleague in pop art. I mean, some people like it but some critics just think it’s a big joke. But I think you can really say that Warhol, at this moment in 1961, is the first person to really understand what pop art is going to be when it becomes a real artistic movement.īrancaccio: And at when he gets one of his, if not his first, gallery show - this is the one in Los Angeles. And other artists were doing it at the same time - Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg. It wasn’t even this work exactly, it was his famous “Campbell’s Soup Cans.” So it takes more than a year for this transition to happen, and Warhol helps it happen. And it’s not until July 1962 that he has his first solo show of this kind of work. ![]() We’re talking April 1961 when Warhol first shows these in a department store window. It wasn’t like the gallery owners walked by this window and went, “This is the next big thing!” It was a process. This is going to compete with Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso.” Getting commercial art into galleriesīrancaccio: But it didn’t go right to the fine art galleries. What was amazing was to say, “This is fine art. It was only when it left the window and went into the gallery that people were shocked. So as window dressing, it would have all looked pretty normal - fun, light, lively stuff to get girls to buy clothes. In fact, Warhol’s own commercial art often looked like pop art. Gopnik: Yeah, but what’s funny is that when someone walked by that Gunther Jaeckel window, they actually wouldn’t have been shocked by those props because commercial art had been doing stuff that looked a lot like pop art for the previous 10 years. And it’s that kind of stuff that Warhol was starting to frame as not just advertising dreck, but art. You’ve got, it looks like almost a silk screen of a nose job ad. One of them is a drawing, and part of it looks like the Pepsi-Cola logo. And that really freaked them out.īrancaccio: I’m looking at a color photo of the window in question, and there’s a bunch of mannequins with the dresses that the store is trying to sell. Because what happened is when he started showing these new works of, let’s call it now pop art, people just saw them as pieces of commerce that were being put into galleries. And the amazing eureka moment for him is when he realizes, “My God, I could take these props and turn them into fine art if I just show them in a gallery.” And of course, that was meant to shock, and it did shock. But he did something in this store that was different, right?īlake Gopnik: Yeah, he is invited to do the window dressing for the windows at Gunther Jaeckel department store. The store window that birthed a movementĭavid Brancaccio: So 60 years ago, Andy Warhol had been doing window displays for department stores for years, along with a lot of other commercial art. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation. Gopnik spoke with Brancaccio about how Warhol made the jump from commercial illustration to fine art - and why the move likely led to his massive influence in contemporary life, as analyzed by economists. ![]() And that really freaked them out,” Gopnik told “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. “People just saw them as pieces of commerce that were being put into galleries. It was only when it left the window and went into the gallery that people were shocked,” said Blake Gopnik, a contributor to The New York Times and the author of the comprehensive biography “Warhol.” “As window dressing, it would have all looked pretty normal - fun, light, lively stuff to get girls to buy clothes. In April 1961, Andy Warhol debuted what would become the first pieces of pop art in the window of a New York City department store. Warhol had been working as a window dresser for years, and the pieces themselves were not particularly provocative - until the store display came down and Warhol insisted those very same commercial images had a place in the world of fine art. ![]() A pivotal moment in Andy Warhol’s career occurred 60 years ago this spring, when the artist displayed what would become the very first pieces of the eventually ubiquitous pop art movement - and they appeared not in an art gallery, but in the window of a Gunther Jaeckel department store in Manhattan.
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