ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) Sale 1150, Lot 47 Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) Synthetic polymer and silkscreen inks on canvas Estimate: $1,500,000-2,000,000 From California to Chelsea, the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s, changed forever the face of art. 'Once you got Pop you could never see a sign the same way again,' Andy Warhol once famously pointed out, 'and once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.' Emerging in the early 1960s as a kind of hip cultural response by a new generation of young artists to the cultural climate of life in a modern consumer capitalist economy, Pop art radically transformed the modern art world by merging the highbrow aesthetics of fine art with the popular imagery of advertising, the supermarket, and the car showroom. 'Pop Art took the inside and put it outside and took the outside and put it inside', Warhol once explained. 'The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second - comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles - all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.' As Gerhard Richter, one of Warhol's Pop art counterparts in Germany, explained in 1963, what was radically new about Pop Art was that it 'recognizes the modern mass media as a genuine cultural phenomenon and turns their attributes, formulations and content, through artifice, into art.' In doing so it fundamentally changed the face of modern painting and inaugurated its own aesthetic revolution. 'One of the phenomenal things about the Pop artists was that they were already painting alike when they met', Warhol remembered. Taking its name from a word on a lollipop in the British artist, Richard Hamilton's collage painting Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing of 1956, Pop art emerged simultaneously in many Western countries, but was most predominant in Britain and in the U.S. Although it took many distinct forms however, the Pop art sensibility was always clearly identifiable. In America, a certain distinction can be divined between East and West Coast 'Pop' - between the coldly objective images of consumerism and the modern industrial mass-media in the paintings of artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol and the hip zen-like 'cool' of Ruscha's word paintings and David Hockney's much celebrated California pool paintings. Interestingly and perhaps appropriately, neither Ruscha nor Hockney are native to California, Ruscha having been born in Omaha, Nebraska and then growing up in Oklahoma and Hockney having come to Los Angeles from Yorkshire, via the Royal College of Art in London. In spite of this, the work of both artists has come to define the essence of Southern California in the popular imagination. For both artists, the vacant shallowness of so much that is L.A. proved a revelation for their highly graphic art. On arrival in 1964 Hockney remembered noticing that 'there were no paintings of Los Angeles, people didn't even know what it looked like… I remember seeing, within the first week, the ramp of a freeway going into the air and I suddenly thought: My God, this place needs its Piranesi; Los Angeles could have its Piranesi, so here I am!.' Hockney's Picture of Nick Wilder of 1966 is one of his most important works being not only one of the first of the California pool pictures with which he established his international reputation but also the first major portrait that he attempted since developing his mature style. Emphasising the flatness of L.A. architecture, this cleverly stylised painting clearly relates to photography, looking to some degree like a painted polaroid. The elegant composition, flat planes and illustrative style of Hockney's paint all combine to generate a sense of cosy artifice and of the warm synthetic lifestyle that Hockney found so appealing about his new-found home. But if California is in Hockney's vision a modern-day Xanadu then, as Woody Guthrie once sang, 'you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the Do-Re-Mi', and something of this side of the West Coast is to be found in Ed Ruscha's Desire, painted in 1969. Ruscha, like Guthrie, grew up in Oklahoma and first arrived in California by driving across the States along the legendary Route 66. The seeming unreality of the endless flat and featureless horizon lines of the journey, punctuated only by the passing advertising billboards and gas station signs made a deep impression on the artist and came to form the basis of his deceptively simple word-based paintings. The Cowboy Magritte of American Pop art, Ruscha takes words and sayings and translates them by painterly means into strange and often alienatory pictorial landscapes. 'There is no reality when it comes to a word,' Ruscha points out, 'and that's why I feel its a real comfortable zone for me to work in.' Desire is part of a series of liquid word paintings that Ruscha made in the late 1960s. Against what seems to be an infinite expanse of California sunset orange, the word 'desire' appears to have been finger-written in a champagne-like liquid, punctuated with caviar, in a way that eloquently encapsulates a sense of both the luxury and decadence that permeates the sharp end of the American Dream. Using the techniques of the commercial artist and the billboard painter to explore the nature of desire Ruscha turns the material dreams of a capitalist society in on themselves and exposes them as mere fleeting ephemera against the permanence of the Western horizon.The techniques of the billboard also characterize that more permanent if also banal image of America's consumer-based industry: the Campbell's soup can. The quintessential icon of Pop Art, Warhol's Campbell Soup Can was in fact, as comforting an image to Warhol, as the California swimming pools were to Hockney, being the soup his mother regularly used to make for him at home in Pittsburgh. First exhibited on the West Coast in the Ferus Gallery in 1962, the Soup Can paintings' minimalist and endlessly reproducible permutations of seemingly bland iconography caused a sensation. Though they made their debut on the West Coast the Soup Cans are however essentially icons of East Coast Pop because of their implicit emphasis on the industry of consumerist mass production. East Coast Pop art is distinguishable from that of the West Coast predominantly because it involved itself with the images of the mass media and with the industry of popular culture. Although people 'like to think of industrialization as being despicable' Roy Lichtenstein pointed out, 'I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it…There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We're using those things - but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teen-agerism, and terrorism.' In his own work Lichtenstein adopted the techniques of the cartoon and of commercial art in order to re-explore the history of Western art. 'All my art is in some way about other art even if the other art is cartoons', he once said, and having adopted the sterile industrial designs of the cartoon he was able to reveal a unique kind of beauty in all his imagery. As his two very different paintings Figure with Banner of 1978 and Woman Reading of 1980 show, having adopted this distinct and clearly industrially based stylization, his paintings cease to 'look like a painting of something' but rather begin to 'look like the thing itself.' A subversive take on the traditional subject matter of the reclining nude and the still-life, there is an element of whimsical humour in these works that is typical of much of Lichtenstein's late work, conveying a sense that along with the seriousness and deliberate subversiveness of the Pop aesthetic, in the end, Pop art was also about having fun. 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