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The Wick Culture - Discover Roy Lichtenstein, Paper Shopping Bag

Discover Roy Lichtenstein, Paper Shopping Bag

1964, © Christie’s

Here’s one for our American friends celebrating Thanksgiving this week: a delectable turkey, dished up by the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. The original 1961 version was inspired by an advertisement for turkeys in a newspaper. Three years later, Lichtenstein worked with screen printers to reproduce it on a series of shopping bags for the exhibition American Supermarket at New York’s Bianchini Gallery, which highlighted the differences and similarities between the actual consumer objects and pop artists’ depictions of them. Warhol was among them, of course.

The exhibition was designed to resemble a supermarket, with a check-out counter, aisles and shelves, stocked with real and plastic food items, displayed alongside the artworks. To blur the lines between art and commerce, the works were sold at cheap prices, with Lichtenstein’s bags selling for just $12. They now fetch around $2000 at auction.

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