Warhol Coke Bottle from First Use of Silk Screening in Christie’s Oct. 3 Up Close Sale

The lead lot of Christie’s Up Close sale on October 3rd during Frieze Week is a Warhol coke bottle about the size of a sheet of paper from 1962 estimated at between £1.8 and £2.5m:

The empty bottle is brought to gleaming life in black silkscreen ink, with hand-painting in pale green and white. Uniquely among the ten works of this series, one of which is now held in the Daros Collection and another in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, a blue ballpoint outline is visible beneath the layer of green paint. Indisputably beautiful and alluring, Coke Bottle’s unfilled container is a perfect register of the quasi-religious promise of the American Dream: Warhol’s daring small-format presentation of the lone, empty bottle makes a bold statement of faith. ‘What does Coca Cola mean to you? ’Warhol was asked in 1962. He replied: ‘Pop.’