
In a mingling of pop art and advertising, about 30 Andy Warhol renderings of Coca-Cola's curvy trademark bottle will go on display at a new museum near the headquarters of the world's largest beverage maker.
Most of the paintings, pencil sketches, and screenprints—all about Coke, except for a self-portrait—will be on exhibit beginning May 24 at the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta.
The paintings are on loan for a year from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. A half-hidden Coke logo looms above the trademark bottle in a dark 70-by-52-inch painting on linen from 1961. A violet splash of color spills from a Coke can in a large screenprint created for a 1985 cover of Time magazine that was never published.
And perhaps most amusedly self-conscious of all, there's a black-and-white photograph from the 1970s of an empty Coke bottle standing next to a can of Campbell's tomato soup—another of Warhol's pop icons.
''Warhol took art and made it available to the everyday man, and everybody understood it,'' said Ted Ryan, the exhibit's curator for the Coca-Cola Co. ''Everybody owns a piece of Coke, or a piece of Marilyn, at least in the imagination.''
The new Coke museum replaces one that opened in 1990 and closed April 7 after drawing about 13 million visitors. Aside from its always-popular tasting lounge of Coca-Cola products from around the world, the new, twice-as-big museum features more than 1,000 Coke artifacts never exhibited before.
With images including Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, Warhol made a career of turning everyday objects and famous faces into pop art. He died in 1987. (AP)
These comments are reproduced as written by visitors to this Web site. They have not been edited for content, grammar, or spelling. The viewpoints appearing here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or views of advocate.com, The Advocate, or its affiliates.
Be the first to comment on this story.
If you would like to submit a comment for posting, please fill out the form above.
All comments submitted via this form are subject to posting or publication. (To send a private letter to an Advocate editor or writer, please use the e-mail button at the top of the page, or use snail mail.) If you would like your comment considered for publication in The Advocate magazine, please include your full name, your city of residence, and a phone number where you can be reached during business hours so that we can confirm your identity. Your e-mail address and telephone number are strictly confidential and will not be shared or used for any purpose other than to contact you about your comment.
See the Contact page for sending comments for reasons other than responding to Advocate editorial and news stories.
Please note that comments sent by fax or snail mail are unlikely to be posted, although they will be considered for publication along with all letters received via e-mail or via this Web page. Comments that chiefly concern Advocate.com content will be considered for posting only on the Web site. The Advocate reserves the right to edit submitted comments for grammar, spelling, obscenities, or libel; we will, however, do our best to preserve the original comment's style and intent. Comments considered for publication in The Advocate magazine may also be edited for length.