Harland Miller
DEMONS ARE FOREVER, 2024
Etching with relief printing and extensive hand finishing
49 3/4 x 34 in
126.5 x 86.4 cm
Available at VFA
There was a time when the publishers of Penguin Books thought about suing Harland Miller for using their cover design as the basis for his artworks. Instead, Penguin invited Miller to peruse their archives and continue to create his funny, smart, satirical work.
They may have understood how much their books meant to him when he spent time in Paris after graduating with his MFA from the Chelsea School of Art in London. Miller, born in Yorkshire in 1964, said that there were times, in Paris, when he felt homesick and that finding used copies of both Penguin and Pelican books gave him a feeling of comfort.
Miller continues to use Penguin cover designs and has enhanced his works using different media, like woodcuts and etching.
Our recent acquisition, Demons Are Forever, 2024, combines etching with relief printing as well as extensive hand finishing; a painterly style that has produced an exceptionally brilliant fine art print.
Harland Miller lives and works in London.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) had a similar experience with the Campbell’s Soup Company that Harland Miller had with Penguin Books.
In 1962 Warhol exhibited 32 Campbell’s Soup Can paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, one for each flavor of soup that the company produced. The company sent a lawyer to the gallery, who considered obtaining a cease-and-desist order. The action was reconsidered when the company was taken over in July of 1962 by John T. Dorrance, Jr., the son of the inventor of condensed soup and an avid art collector. The company sent a few cases of tomato soup to Warhol at his home in New York.
In 1966, the Campbell’s Soup Company officially partnered with Warhol and invited consumers to send in a couple of can labels and $1.00 in exchange for a Warhol designed dress made of paper. The promotion was a success. The dress is now selling for about $20,000 at art galleries and online and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute.
The Campbell’s Soup Company, to this day, works with the Warhol Foundation to fundraise for Visual Arts projects. One of Warhol’s soup can paintings hangs in the company’s headquarters in Camden, New Jersey.
Although the 1962 exhibit of the soup cans was not a success, and Warhol was still better known then as a commercial artist rather than a fine artist, the original set of all 32 soup can paintings was sold to the Museum of Modern Art, valued at $15 million. (The auction record for a work by Warhol is $195 million at Christie’s for the silkscreen Shot Sage Blue Marilyn in 2022.)
Our most recent acquisitions of works by Andy Warhol are the screenprint Flowers from Portfolio of 10 Flowers, 1970 and the silkscreen Committee 2000, 1982.
The Andy Warhol Museum is preparing an exhibit that examines the dark themes in the works of both Andy Warhol and KAWS. KAWS + Warhol will be presented at the Andy Warhol Museum from May 18, 2024 through January 20, 2025.
References:
Alexandra Paters. Why Campbell Soup hated, then embraced, Andy Warhol’s soup can paintings. CNN/Business. July 29, 2022.
Adrian Florido, Gabe O’Connor, Roberta Rampton. 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn' rakes in the green. NPR/All Things Considered/Fine Art. May 10, 2022.
