Even before so-called "Appropriation Art" had its great breakthrough in the 1980s and received its philosophical legitimation from Roland Barthes and Michel Focault, who celebrated the "death of the author" and the "birth of the reader", Richard Pettibone began appropriating works by Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns, Stella, Duchamp and other great names of art history in the early 1960s and presenting miniature replicas of them. Almost simultaneously with the creation of the Campbell Soup Cans, he began to transfer them onto canvas in a smaller format, also using screen-printing techniques. His painted commentary on the claim to originality of Western art was thus ignited by an artist who himself was already playing subversive games with originality. When Pettibone visited Warhol in his factory in the 1960s, he showed him his miniature versions of various soup cans: "I just didn't know if he was going to sue me or what. But I wanted to be polite and show him the things first. I thought I should do it. It was the next logical step for me, and he totally got it. He liked the paintings."
Provenance available
