In 1962, Andy Warhol, one of the 20th-century’s pre-eminent figures in Pop Art, produced some of what now are considered his signature works: “Gold Marilyn Monroe.” “Marilyn Diptych.” “Campbell’s Soup Cans.”
Not as famous: A potato-print promotional poster for The New York Times.
Though Warhol may be better known for his fine art, he was also an acclaimed commercial illustrator. In the mid-to-late 1950s, he created advertisements for I. Miller, a high-end women’s footwear company, many of which appeared weekly in The Times.
In 1962, Louis Silverstein, then the corporate art director for The Times (he’d become the newspaper’s art director in 1970) commissioned Warhol to create a promotional poster. The poster would be mailed to advertisers to persuade them to buy space in an upcoming special Travel section, the “Winter Vacation Supplement.” (It was a particularly notable era of advertisements at The Times; there was also a series by the artist Tomi Ungerer, as well as the “I Got My Job Through The New York Times” campaign.)
Text on the Warhol poster touted The Times as “America’s biggest and best-read vacation news and advertising medium.” At 33 by 21½ inches, the poster accommodated 11 illustrations, including an anthropomorphic sun, a school of fish, an ice skate, a woman sunbathing and a man playing tennis.
The original poster is stored in a flat file cabinet in the Morgue, The Times’s underground repository of archival materials. A framed copy is there, too, on display.
To make the image, Warhol used potato stamps. He first carved each illustration into the face of a sliced potato, which was then dipped in ink and stamped onto paper, according to pages from an unpublished manuscript by Silverstein about art and graphics at The Times, which is also stored in the Morgue.
Sounds like a column for another day.
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