Fragile—Handle with Care

One of only two paintings which utilize the ‘FRAGILE HANDLE WITH CARE’ motif, the present work is an early example of Andy Warhol’s interest in transforming quotidian objects into high art. Painted in 1962, shortly after he completed his now iconic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, the present work displays the same degree of formal inquiry but on a more intimate and personal scale. One of the last works to contain handmade elements before he moved entirely to his mechanical silkscreen technique, Fragile—Handle with Care is a notable work from within his early oeuvre. The ‘FRAGILE HANDLE WITH CARE’ motif proved to be a particular favorite for the artist during this time as he used it to produce a dress worn at the opening and studio party for the exhibition of box sculptures at the Stable Gallery in April 1964 and again later that year at the Factory.

In the present work, 18 impressions of the ubiquitous shipping label are laid out in a 3 x 6 grid. Sometimes the individual screens overlap, while at other times thin slivers of white ground emerge between the impressions. The idiosyncratic nature of this arrangement is characteristic of Warhol’s early work and defiantly reveals the direct presence of the artist’s hand, something which is typical of his work from this period where Warhol did much of the production himself. The boldness of the word FRAGILE, together with the subsidiary warning ‘handle with care’ mirrors the formal composition of the labels of his favorite soup cans, together with bold use of red silkscreen ink. Repetition also plays a crucial part in the overall aesthetic, something that would from the backbone of the rest of his career.

Fragile—Handle with Care dates from a short period of rapid discovery that occurred during a crucial period in Warhol's career. Between March and May of 1962, the artist produced three series of work that included the shipping labels, Martinson Coffee can labels and Coca-Cola bottles. All three of these series were characterized by Warhol's use of hand-drawn images from which he created a silkscreen template. It was only a few months later that Warhol began using actual source material to create silkscreens, further mechanizing his technique. The present work belongs to this second category. Warhol moved on quickly from these series, moving further from the handmade to the more mechanical forms of reproduction, something that he saw as indicative of that moment in time. "Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine...the reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine" (A. Warhol, interview for Art News, November 1963, reproduced in A. Oliva, Andy Warhol: The American Dream, Porto Cervo, 2013, p. 15).

Marking a dramatic break from the prevailing brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, Fragile—Handle with Care represents a pivotal moment when Warhol was on the brink of surrendering the primacy of the gestural hand of the artist in favor of the more mechanized process of silkscreening. While other artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were also working with the technique, for them it was mainly used as a stark counterpoint to the gestural brushwork of their peers. Warhol, by contrast, embraced the technique as the perfect vehicle for his investigations into the visual effects of repetition. Rather than the rash and exuberant or almost violent brushstrokes invoked by his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, Warhol demonstrates extreme delicacy, care and machine-like precision with his materials, while maintaining the unique and one-of-a-kindness in the paint rendering of each "fragile" stamp.