Pop in pop culture: New Coca-Cola museum hosts Andy Warhol art

<p>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 the company's headquarters.</p><p>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 in downtown Atlanta.</p><p>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-inch-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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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."</p><p>The new museum replaces one near the Georgia State Capitol building that opened in 1990 and closed April 7 after drawing about 13 million visitors. Aside from its always-popular tasting lounge of Coca-Cola products from around the world, the new, twice-as-big museum will feature more than 1,000 Coke artifacts never exhibited before.</p><p>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.</p><p>Peter Schelstraete, global brand director for Coca-Cola, jokes that "Andy Warhol was one of our best brand directors."</p><p>The museum will be next door to the Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest aquarium, across the street from Centennial Olympic Park and a short walk from CNN's headquarters and the Georgia Dome.</p><p>___</p><p>On The Net:</p><p>HASH(0x1cdc7d8)</p><p>HASH(0x1cdc880)</p>

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