S & H Green Stamps, Andy Warhol

Artwork Overview

Andy Warhol, S & H Green Stamps
Andy Warhol, S & H Green Stamps
Andy Warhol
S & H Green Stamps
1962
Andy Warhol, artist
1928–1987
S & H Green Stamps, 1962
Where object was made: United States
Material/technique: ink under glass; rubber stamping
Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 584 x 457 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 23 0.9921 x 18 0.9921 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 31 3/4 x 25 3/4 x 1 in
Weight (Weight): 9 lbs
Credit line: Gift from the Gene Swenson Collection
Accession number: 1970.0150
On display: Brosseau Learning Center
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Exhibition Label: “Make a Mark: Art of the 1960s,” Mar-2008, Lara Kuykendall Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Take a canvas. Put a mark on it. Put another mark on it. Jasper Johns. “Sketchbook Notes,” 1965 In the 1960s artists from the United States and beyond strove to “make a mark” on the art world and the culture at large by exploring the nature of creativity. Each of the three themes in this exhibition, color + form, gesture + splatter, and layer upon layer, shows how vivid and dynamic the art of this decade was. Some artists used color and geometric shapes abstractly, often to foster unusual optical effects, whereas others employed the personal, autographic gesture of expressionism. Still other artists exploited various methods of layering to create new kinds of collage. By doing something to an object or putting marks on a surface, artists in the 1960s responded to the realms of art, politics, and popular culture. The objects and images they made defined the visual culture of their generation. Exhibition Label: "Sum of the Parts: Recent Works on Paper," Jun-2001, Stephen Goddard Savings stamps, which were glued into booklets to be redeemed for merchandise, were a natural subject for pop artist Andy Warhol. Warhol became famous for his paintings of other everyday items such as Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes. He also made a screenprint of savings stamps, but the Spencer Museum work is a unique rendering made with rubber stamps that have been stamped in rows to create the effect of a full perforated sheet. Certainly the playfulness of stamping stamps is part of the appeal of this work.

Resources

Audio

Didactic – Art Minute
Didactic – Art Minute
Episode 259 Mar-2008, re-recorded May-2012 I’m David Cateforis with another Art Minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. Emulating the processes of manufacturing, the American Pop artist Andy Warhol used mechanical techniques that minimized his physical involvement in art making. One such technique was rubber stamping, used to create the Spencer’s 1962 work on paper, S&H Green Stamps. To make it, Warhol and his assistant carved three Art Gum erasers with different designs and used them sequentially to render the perforated sheet of trading stamps with their distinctive red S & H logo. The work plays on the word stamp, referring both to its technique and its subject, and offers a visual rhyme between the printed perforations and the actual perforations at the top of the sheet, torn from a spiral-bound pad. Real trading stamps were themselves printed on perforated sheets, the source of Warhol’s repetitive grid composition - an early example of his use of repetition to evoke the numbing standardization of mass-produced images and commodities. But even as it emulates machine printing, S&H Green Stamps reveals its hand manufacture in numerous details, creating a tension between the handmade and the mechanically reproduced characteristic of Warhol’s work. From the Spencer Museum of Art, I’m David Cateforis.