Andy Warhol is a significant artist and influenced the decade of the 1960s. He realised and picked up on the boom time after the depression of 1930s America he was born into. The 1950s was the start of the consumer revolution. His work was a comment on the mass consumer culture going on around him. He became obsessed with the celebrity icon. The art he created was using images from supermarket brands such as: coco cola, Brillo and Campbells Soup cans. He also became incapturelated by the link between death and celebrity. He made a strong statement about the times he was living in.

He questioned the nature of art and its need to be original. The concept behind the idea was what mattered rather than the skill it took to make it. His art recycled others work and reproduced it. His work was brash, and irreverent and mass produced, just like the world around him.

His Brillo box focuses totally on the image, which jumps out.

“Warhol’s boxes have comic timing. The humour of the work is that Warhol has bothered to make an object at all- just as it may be humorous to think that we are buying things rather than refined images when we purchase commodities “.

“Despite (Brillo) being a three dimensional object, its functional as nothing more than a label. It is not a container of something else there is no Brillo pad inside it-but a sign complete in itself. “ (Kitnick, 2007, 100)

He used a technique that he would be forever associated with, silk-screen printing it was a way he could produce images many and quickly. These images were garish and brightly coloured just like the advertisements to sell to the consumers the goods they desired to make their lives better.

In his Marilyn prints the ink was layered over a black and white photograph taken by Gene Korman.

“The misprints and occasional clogging of the screen gave each face a slightly different expression. Making the point that although her face is reproduced endlessly Marilyn Monroe is not the plastic consumer good she appears to have become…” (Whiting, 1997, 176).

The Monroe image was reproduced to the point where it wasn’t clear where the movie icon ended and the real Monroe began. Warhol’s comment on at and consumer culture was making the point that everyone could produce art and anything could be art.

“..Warhol exaggerated the appearance and style of both the stars themselves and the mass-produced photographic images by which they were known. Warhol’s silk-screens are not therefore, about Taylor and Monroe as real people at all, but about their public image in its purist form.” (Whiting,1997 148).

A star’s true identity is therefore trapped beneath the public image. They became public spectacles. In the 1950s the press set out to uncover the person behind that movie icon image.

Warhol spearheaded the Pop Art movement in America. His art was a statement on the Capitalist consumer society that had exploded after the hardship of the Second World War and the end of rations in food and consumer goods that enveloped the early 1960s. He created work that reflected this and made art accessible to the masses rather that the high art bourgeois that it was before this.

“In February 1965, Life illustrated an article on Pop fashion, home appliance and advertising with a dress based on Warhol’s silk-screen prints of the Campbell’s soup cans” (Whiting. 1997, 179).