“My image is a stat.mes nt of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.”
In the grisaille glimmer of the diamond ring in Carat, romantic fantasies of love intermingle with mass consumption and mechanical reproduction – two of the most defining motifs in Andy Warhol’s legendary career. A rare, early precursor for his later paintings based on newspaper images, including the Death and Disaster series, Carat dates to a seminal moment in Warhol’s career when he was still painting by hand in 1961, only one year before he transitioned to the revolutionary silkscreen methodology that would fully depersonalize his production. Phantom washes of white paint permeate the composition in Carat, forming the underlayers onto which Warhol registers the shimmering commodity in crisp yet irregular black ink lamina, like the ephemera of newsprint imagery. Here, Warhol appropriates the t.mes less opulence and ecstasy behind the symbol of the diamond ring in an image that ingeniously belies its quotidian source: a jewelry advertisement that targets working-class consumer audiences.
Carving out the nascent origins of the Pop Art era, with Carat Warhol revealed the vicissitudes of modern American society by using iconography that he appropriated directly from the heart of consumer imagery: the newspaper advertisement. By dislocating a Daily News advertisement for a diamond ring from its broader contextual and commercial framework, Warhol ingeniously removed the frame from its relation to the rest of the story. The allure of luxury and the glamor of romance, mesmerizing at first glance, altogether dissolve into a banal reality upon our recognition of the image’s advertorial source. “And yet, even here, in a seemingly universal or even bourgeois symbol like the diamond ring, closer attention to Warhol’s source material reveals another story,” writes Anthony Grudin. “The ring advertisements that Warhol copied were printed on a regular basis in working-class tabloids like the New York Daily News… It was available on credit for $2.75 down, $2.00 weekly.” (Anthony Grudin, Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (and traveling), Warhol Headlines, 2011-2013, pp. 46-47)
“And yet, even here, in a seemingly universal or even bourgeois symbol like the diamond ring, closer attention to Warhol’s source material reveals another story. The ring advertisements that Warhol copied were printed on a regular basis in working-class tabloids like the New York Daily News… It was available on credit for $2.75 down, $2.00 weekly.”
With his daring response to post-war American modernity’s media and consumerist saturation, Warhol sought a form of art that would reflect the same alienation he witnessed burgeoning in society around him. While Warhol discovered a radical means to remove the hand of the artist with his signature silkscreen technique in 1962, Carat is a seminal and rare painting in Warhol’s conceptual development, witnessing the artist during the nascent stages of his career when he still painted by hand. Using a projector to enlarge his source imagery onto a canvas mounted on a wall, in such early paintings from 1960-61 as Carat, Warhol applied liquid casein to render the motif freehand. As such, “dripping paint and splotches of nonchalant brushwork undermined the signal-life display of the motif,” writes curator George Frei. “The disrupted lettering also produced a language with neither syntax nor meaning. This experimental painting - defined by a spontaneous brushstroke and transformative intent – would remain the exception.” (Exh. Cat., Zurich, Thomas Ammann Replica Handbags AG, Andy Warhol. Black & White + Silver, 2019, p. 16) Omitting the second “s” in the word “happiness” that is engraved onto the ring (and never fully depicting the two dollar price tag in the lower right corner), Carat maintains a ghostly, unresolved quality, which sees Warhol reveling in the dialectic between mechanical reproduction and manual craft, with its unavoidable capacity for human error.
With Carat, Warhol incisively exploits a defining stereotype of our modern culture: the moment of engagement as the ultimate expression of true love. His distortion and magnification of the image in scale here elevate this idealized event and the classical symbolism of the ring to the ultimate status of signifier, effectively triggering universal connotations of love, happiness, and ritual – all without the aid of any surrounding narrative structure. By intentionally appropriating such a symbolic and recognizable commodity from a consumerist context, Warhol astutely focuses on the very mechanisms by which modern capitalism operates: desire, fantasy, and their affiliate emotions. “This was what Warhol found in American myths: not.mes rely the universal appeal of superheroes or of bodily perfection, or the personal pathos of his own distance from these ideals,” continues Grudin, “but the power these myths held for the disadvantaged and the ways in which cultural participation was marketed to them alongside consumption.” (Anthony Grudin, Op. Cit., pp. 46-47)
“This was what Warhol found in American myths: not.mes rely the universal appeal of superheroes or of bodily perfection, or the personal pathos of his own distance from these ideals, but the power these myths held for the disadvantaged and the ways in which cultural participation was marketed to them alongside consumption.”
Warhol was no stranger to the worlds of advertising and print, beginning his career as a commercial artist in New York in 1949 with advertisements and illustrations for various magazines, department stores and record companies. He instinctively understood the phenomenal potential of popular imagery, and, more than any artist of his generation, he realigned the cipher of that imagery to critically address the ever-proliferating pictorial panorama of culture in 1960s America. Carat oscillates between the emotional content of its rhapsodic imagery and the detached, readymade nature of its advertisement source, succinctly crystalizing the style and themes that preoccupied Warhol for the rest of his life. Like the iconic Coca-Cola bottles in others of his early black-and-white Pop paintings, the advertised engagement ring here represents a perfect symbol for Warhol – ordinary, yet pervasive as a mass-produced object, all while remaining a provocative symbol of American capitalism and desire. “My image is a stat.mes nt of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today,” Warhol said in 1961. “It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.” (The artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Zurich, Thomas Ammann Replica Handbags AG, Andy Warhol. Black & White + Silver, 2019, p. 16) Isolated from the context of the newspaper advertisement, the engagement ring in Carat twinkles with the hopeful ecstasy of promised love and commitment, the spectacular appeal that Warhol saw underlie the machinations of everyday consumer culture.
