A studio that became a box factory
By late 1963 Andy Warhol had a problem most artists would envy: he was famous, and he needed to keep being startling. He had already shown his hand-painted Campbell’s soup cans in Los Angeles in 1962 and started silkscreening Marilyns and dollar bills. His studio on East 47th Street, soon to be lined floor to ceiling in silver foil, was about to get the name it kept: the Factory. And in the winter of 1963 into 1964, Warhol turned the Factory into exactly that, a small factory, this time for boxes.
Here is what he made there. He hired carpenters to build plywood boxes to the exact dimensions of the cardboard shipping cartons that supermarkets received their stock in. Then he and his Factory assistants, chief among them Gerard Malanga, his principal silkscreen hand in these years, house-painted the bare wood and silkscreened the brand graphics onto the sides. (A silkscreen, the process at the center of all Warhol’s work in these years, prints an image by pushing ink through a fine mesh stencil onto a surface below; it is how T-shirts and posters are mass-printed, which is exactly why he liked it.) They did this hundreds of times.
And not only Brillo. The Factory turned out boxes printed as Mott’s Apple Juice, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Del Monte Peach Halves, Campbell’s Tomato Juice, and Heinz Tomato Ketchupas well. The Brillo box, the carton for the soap-and-steel-wool scouring pads that scrubbed American kitchen pots, simply became the one everyone remembered, partly because of how good its red-white-and-blue label looked stacked into a wall, and partly because of an argument it was about to start. “Brillo Boxes” is really the name for a whole grocery aisle of these things.
He unveiled them in April 1964 at his second solo show at the Stable Gallery in New York, and he did not hang a few on pedestals. He filled both rooms, floor to chest height, with the boxes stacked in rows like a stockroom. A visitor walked in off the street and met what looked, for a confused second, like a grocery warehouse, or a delivery bay where the truck had just unloaded. Except every carton was hand-built wood, painted and printed to look like cardboard. First, how the boxes were actually made.