I guess we know that Warhol screenprinted fabric so Sarah Dalton and Suzanne Moss could make dresses to wear to the April 1964 Stable Gallery afterparty at the Factory.
When Moss took her Brillo Box dress on yellow canvas to Sotheby’s in 2007, she gave this “Guess this is my 15 minutes!”-style quote about it before it sold for $264,000:
I was visiting Andy at the Factory when out of the blue he proposed that I make a dress to wear at the Brillo Box Exhibition after-party. Wow! I raced to the Garment District and returned with the lightweight canvas he’d requested. He and Gerard Malanga immediately screened the Brillo images onto the material and off I went to create the dress. Andy was speechless upon my arrival! I felt like a New York City Cinderella, dancing the night away in my Box dress, wolfing down hot dogs from an umbrella cart man Ethel Scull had dragged in from the street…
Off I went, Andy was speechless, sure sounds to me like Warhol saw the dress for the first time at the party. The dress which is actually a skirt and a top, is pieced together from eight printed panels in two separated tiers. The yellow Brillo Box (3¢ off) is smaller and rectangular, not square, so it has two sides 13 x 16 inches, and two sides 13 x 11 inches, a configuration Moss did not follow.
In Sotheby’s evening sale in May 2015, a single uncut repeat of Moss’s fabric appeared, stretched as a 1964 painting titled, Brillo Box (3¢ off). It had bounced around Pennsylvania—from a Philadelphia arts space named Clerestorey to a couple of local collections—before going through Ronald Feldman, the Warhol Authentication Board, Feldman’s buyer in 2003, and the Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 in 2004. It sold for $1.8 million.
Though Moss herself is not listed in the painting’s provenance, the painting’s origin is obviously linked to her dress. Some new details come, perhaps, from a fuller account of its making than Sotheby’s published in 2007. [I can find no other source for Moss’s story.]
Moss was instructed to purchase fabric in either white or yellow; she chose yellow and Warhol selected the screen for his Brillo (3₵ Off) boxes, making adjacent impressions of the front and the narrower side face of the fabric so that once sewn the dress would be box-like in construction, with four sides. Moss was given the extra fabric as a painting.
Given the extra fabric. As a painting. Sending Moss out for white or yellow fabric does sound like Warhol had a Brillo Box dress in mind from the jump. And “box-like in construction” does fit the layout of the screens on the fabric, even if what Moss ended up doing didn’t fit. But we have a count, then, and see that Moss cut up four repeats of the screen, and had one leftover. As a painting. At least one.
But by 2015 readers of the catalogue raisonné already know that Moss had more fabric left. Because another fabric painting is on the same page. This Brillo Box (3¢ off) is eight feet tall, and signed, and stamped by the Authentication Board. The jankiness of the screenprinting cannot be overlooked; it’s almost artisanal. The painting’s owner bought it from Feldman in 1988, so right after the artist’s death. It showed up at Sotheby’s in November 2015, where it did not sell for $5-7 million.
As Sotheby’s explained it,
Moss was given the present work by the artist, constructed by stretching the extra fabric to a totemic stretcher. While Warhol executed a number of Brillo box sculptures, the artist made only two Brillo paintings—the present work and a far smaller, 15 by 28 ½ inch version.
Given the work, the artist made. So Moss used less than half the screenprinted fabric to make one dress of half print & half plain fabric, and [Warhol] turned the rest into two paintings [for her], one of which Warhol signed? And then she yeeted herself out of art history completely, without even shooting a Screen Test? I am truly fascinated. I wonder if this story is in the new book about Warhol’s textile and fashion-related works? After 11 years, Sotheby’s is trying again to sell this painting privately.