• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 7, 2017

A compact documentary premiering Monday on HBO takes us on a nearly 50-year journey with an Andy Warhol Brillo box, and in the process, manages to synthesize the art, commerce and culture of an entire era.

This remarkable documentary, running all of 40 minutes, is called “Brillo Box (3¢ Off).” It was made by Lisanne Skyler, a film professor and filmmaker who grew up in New York City in the ’60s and ’70s but now lives in Arizona.

Her documentary tells the story principally of a single piece of art -- one of 17 yellow “Brillo Box” sculptures made by Andy Warhol in New York in or around 1964. At the time this work and its many duplicates were created, many critics didn't consider them to be “sculpture” or “art” at all.

The filmmaker’s parents bought this particular Brillo Box in 1969 for $1,000. This piece and others cost $200 each when Warhol first made them. The Skyler family kept their Warhol sculpture for a few years and then traded it for a painting by an artist named Peter Young.

The Skylers -- Martin and Rita -- were middle-class Manhattanites who liked art. To sustain their interest, they bought art, held it for a while, then sold much of it to finance further purchases.

To cut to the chase, the Skyler's Brillo Box last sold at auction in 2010, long after they owned it, for $3,050,500. The buyer was not named, but one of the subsequent owners of this Brillo Box was Charles Saatchi, who bought it in 1988 for $35,200 and sold it in 1993 for $43,700.

One of the reasons this Brillo Box increased so sharply in value was because of the way the Skylers cared for it. When it was in the Skyler's apartment, Martin Skyler had a Plexiglas box custom-made to cover and protect it.

In addition, he got Warhol himself to sign it -- which, the documentary explains, was something of a rarity for these early Warhol “sculptures” that mimicked the cardboard packing crates for supermarket brands such as Campbell's, Del Monte, Heinz, Kellogg's and Brillo. 

Warhol's facsimiles were made of wood, on which he would apply a silkscreen image of the designs he would lift from the originals.

But Lisanne Skyler's documentary is not only a report on how the price of her family's Brillo Box increased to $3 million. It is a concise examination of Warhol and his movement -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

The documentary includes ample criticism that was leveled at Warhol for essentially copying the graphic-design work of others and appropriating it for his own gain.

The film also demonstrates that part of Warhol's genius was that he never denied or became defensive about these accusations.

On the contrary, as one interview clip shows, he would blithely admit to the appropriation accusations and even gave a reason for doing it: He didn't feel like working hard on his art, so he found it easier to just copy other people.

The documentary points out that the original designer of the Brillo box was an abstract-expressionist artist named James Harvey, who made a living as a commercial artist and designer. He died in 1965.

“If it wasn't a Warhol, I wouldn't have bought just anybody’s Brillo Box,” says Martin Skyler, who is interviewed in the film. “How many artists do you know that would take stuff that you could buy off a shelf in a supermarket and turn it into a work of art that could be sold to the public, and make a lot of money on it? He was a genius.”

Skyler admits that he certainly would have liked to have been the one to sell the box for $3 million, but he also notes that it is not possible to go back in time and get a redo.

The documentary traces the rise, fall and then the rise again of Warhol's career and reputation up to the present day when the Brillo boxes, once dismissed and reviled, have “come to be recognized as a turning point in the history of art,” according to the film.

Warhol died in 1987. Yesterday (Sunday, August 6) would have been his 89th birthday.

“Brillo Box (3¢ Off)” premieres Monday (August 7) at 10 p.m. Eastern on HBO.