Image Attribution: “Brillo Boxes by Andy Warhol” by Terryl Atkins is licensed under CC BY-SA. (See interactive map)
These Brillo Boxes by American Pop artist Andy Warhol are not real Brillo boxes. They are cubic shapes that have the ‘look’ of commercial Brillo boxes silk-screened across their surfaces. Warhol was known for his appropriation of mundane imagery and design from mass-produced, easily-recognizable commercially-consumable items and images from popular culture (cans of Campbell’s soup; the face of Marilyn Munro or Jackie Kennedy; a grainy image of a traffic accident from the newspaper). Like other post-WWII American artists (Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauchenberg, Jasper Johns, Claus Oldenburg) his focus was on an American culture anyone could recognize, erasing the boundary between high art and kitsch. Starting in the late 1950’s variations on this movement continue today with works by contemporary artists like Jeff Koons (Balloon Dog).