Saturday June 30, 2007

Box Set

Over at PRINT—where I work intermittently—James Gaddy has a great article up about James Harvey, who you’ve probably never heard of. He’s the guy who designed the actual Brillo cartons that inspired Andy Warhol to create his pop art masterpiece Brillo Box. That might not be so interesting, but it turns out that Harvey was an artist in his own right—a staunch Abstract Expressionist—who loathed the commercial work he did for products like Brillo and Philip Morris. He also knew Warhol slightly, attended the Brillo Box opening, and (like any good AbExer) thought Pop Art was silly. Reading about Harvey and Warhol is like reading about two minds separated by a monumental cultural shift.

The box pictured here, by the way, isn’t a Warhol. It’s an original Brillo carton signed by Harvey. He sent it to friend and art historian Irving Sandler—who still has it—as something of joke. Harvey died shortly thereafter at the age of 36.