From his 1985 Ads series, Apple 359 is a screenprint created by Andy Warhol that has appropriated the logo for Macintosh Computers. The logo, which is now as ubiquitous as the fruit itself, maintains the original design and rainbow color scheme, but Warhol adds his trademark sketched lines and vibrant hues to give the original design an unmistakably Warholian influence. He was commissioned by Del Yocam, the first COO of Apple, as a part of the company’s advertising campaign. The same year this print was created, Warhol encountered Steve Jobs (the founder of Apple) and wrote in his diary about the meeting: “he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll soon make it in color… I felt so old and out of it with this whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.”
Apple (Trial Proof) 359 As A part of Andy Warhol’s Larger Body of Work
In his Ads series, Warhol explores how these widely recognized emblems, trademarks and logos have become symbolic to the American consumer, whether they are aware of it or not. The series contains images ranging from the Mobil Gas logo to Judy Garland as a spokeswoman for Blackglama Furs. There is no explicit pattern in the images Warhol selected to choose, other than their formation as advertisements for large corporations (with the majority of them being American). While this series was not created until towards the end of his life, these images belong to advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s.
Photo credit: Steve Jobs showing Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf how to use a Macintosh computer that Sean Lennon received for his 9th birthday, in 1984. Courtesy of Vintage Everyday, New York.
