Heinz Tomato Ketchup box, Andy Warhol

I’m David Cateforis with another Art Minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. 1960's art crtic Gene Swenson once asked "How do we as Americans find out about ourselves? How have others gone about doing that?" A Kansas native and Yale graduate living in New York, Swenson found America in the painted soup cans and oversized comic panels of the emerging Pop Art movement. In that brilliant but brutal decade, he was pops champion and his style of criticism clashed with contemporary critics whose detatched formalist approach left no room for the deeply personal and emotional response Swenson felt for the art. We can share in his vision: the Gene Swenson collection gifted to the Spencer after his tragic early death in 1969 is a great strength of the museum's modern art collection. Key works from the gift includes James Rosenquist's painting "1-2-3 Outside" and Andy Warhol's "Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box" sculpture, both currently on view in the Twenty Twenty-One gallery. To see more of Swenson's America, visit the Spencer Print Room any Friday between 10:00 and Noon, or 1:00 to 4:00. With thanks to Meredith Moore for her text, from the Spencer Museum of Art, I'm David Cateforis.

Episode 113. I’m David Cateforis with another Art Minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. A painted wood sculpture in the Spencer collection represents a box for shipping Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Nearly identical in appearance to the cardboard supermarket original, it is one of many similar box sculptures that Andy Warhol produced in the mid-1960s, assembly-line fashion, at his New York studio known as the Factory. With assistance from Gerard Malanga and Billy Linich, the artist painted plywood boxes constructed by professional carpenters and silk-screened them with product logos - for Brillo soap pads, Mott’s apple juice, Kellogg’s cornflakes, Del Monte peaches, Campbell’s tomato juice, and Heinz ketchup. When he first exhibited the boxes in 1964 at New York’s Stable gallery, Warhol piled them in high stacks evocative of packed grocery distribution centers, and he suggested that potential collectors could buy them by the stack. The imitative boxes provoked vehement criticism for their celebration of ordinary, commercial subject matter and did not sell well, but now collectors and museums prize them as key examples of Pop art. With thanks to Sean Barker for his text, from the Spencer Museum of Art, I’m David Cateforis.