Coke museum to host Warhol exhibit

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.