Pop Icons - Highlights of Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction - 9 November 2010
Two icons of the Pop Art movement will be found on the front and back covers of the catalogue for Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 9 November 2010 in New York – Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola (est. $20/25 million) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Ice Cream Soda (est. $12/18 million). Both works date to 1962, a watershed year that heralded the beginning of Pop art, and illustrate the essential role that popular culture and consumerism in post-World War II America played in the movement, evidenced by the selection of soda pop as the subject matter in each case. Both monumental masterworks were included in key, early exhibitions of Pop art in 1963 and neither has appeared on the market in several decades.
Andy Warhol’s masterpiece, Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola, is the last of four paintings of individual Coca-Cola bottles executed by Warhol in 1961 and 1962, and the largest of the group (81 5/8 x 56 7/8 in.). Warhol was fascinated by the Coca-Cola bottle and it was a perfect subject for him -- an ordinary, mass produced object, yet loaded with the provocative symbolism of Capitalist America. Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola is a perfect example of the artist’s homage to advertising, highlighting the relationship between big business and the public through an enlarged icon of consumerism. Soon after its execution, Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola was acquired by the noted collectors Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Hirsh, and included in one of the first exhibitions on Pop art – Pop Art USA – at the Oakland Art Museum in September 1963. It was then sold at auction in 1983, when it was acquired by the current owner.
Also executed in 1962, Lichtenstein’s Ice Cream Soda was purchased in March of that year by an eminent Pop art collector and it has remained in the same family ever since. The painting was featured in one of the earliest exhibitions of Pop art - Six Painters and the Object - which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in March 1963. The present work is a classic example of the type of single-object still-lifes in which Lichtenstein elevates commonplace items to subjects of fine art. Like Warhol, he selects an object synonymous with America - the classic ice cream soda - but Lichtenstein also chooses objects for certain aesthetic qualities such as curved contours, reflective or complex surface patterns, particularly glass.
