Coke exhibit hosts Warhol

ATLANTA — In a mingling of pop art, advertising and the real thing, about 30 Andy Warhol renderings of Coca-Cola's curvy trademark bottle will go on display at a new museum near headquarters for the world's largest beverage maker.

Most of the paintings, pencil sketches and screenprints — all about Coke, except for a self-portrait — will be on exhibit beginning May 24 at the new World

of Coca-Cola museum near the company's headquarters here.

The paintings are on loan for a year from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. A half-hidden Coke logo looms above the trademark bottle in a dark 70-by-52-inch painting on linen from 1961. A violet splash of color spills from a Coke can in a large screenprint created for a 1985 cover for Time that was never published.

And perhaps most amusedly self-conscious of all, there's a black-and-white photograph from the 1970s of an empty Coke bottle standing next to a can of Campbell's tomato soup — another of Warhol's pop icons.

"Warhol took art, and he made art available to the everyday man and everybody understood it," said Ted Ryan, the exhibit's curator for The Coca-Cola Co. "Everybody owns a piece of Coke, or a piece of Marilyn, at least in the imagination."

From Campbell's soup cans to Marilyn Monroe, Warhol made a career of turning everyday objects and famous faces into pop art, including Coke bottles. He died in 1987.