Dress, ca. 1966–67
American
Paper printed with allover pattern of Campbell Soup cans in black, red, and gold
American
Paper printed with allover pattern of Campbell Soup cans in black, red, and gold
Purchase, Isabel Shults Fund, Martin and Caryl Horwitz Gift and Hearst Corporation Gifts, 1995 (1995.178.3)
As art historian Marco Livingstone has stressed, Pop Art was never a circumscribed movement with membership and manifestos. Rather, it was a sensibility emergent in the 1950s and rampant in the 1960s. Andy Warhol (who began his career as a fashion illustrator) had been painting Campbell Soup cans since 1962. Such advertising icons, along with cartoons and billboards, yielded a synthesis of word and image, of art and the everyday. Fashion quickly embraced the spirit of Pop, playing an important role in its dissemination. The paper dresses of 1966–67 were throwaways, open to advertising and the commercial.
