Profile of Brillo box designer

On April 21, 1964, James Harvey, with his friend Joan Washburn, walked into New York’s Stable Gallery to see an opening for a rising artist named Andy Warhol. The show—which attracted a line around the block, despite mostly negative reviews—consisted of 400 large replicas of supermarket product boxes for brands such as Heinz, Del Monte, Mott’s, and Kellogg’s, stacked around the gallery as if in a stockroom. The ones that attracted the most attention were the 120 containers for Brillo cleaning pads. “Oh my god,” Harvey said to Washburn when he saw the Brillo boxes. “I designed those.”

At the time, Harvey was known, if at all, as a second-generation abstract expressionist painter who applied his oils so thickly that a 1961 New York Times review described him as “obviously having a love affair with his paint.” (Washburn worked at the Graham Gallery, which had hosted several of Harvey’s exhibitions.) But his day job was as a commercial artist for the industrial and package designers Stuart and Gunn, creating redesigns for companies like Philip Morris and Bristol-Myers. Three years before, Brillo implemented his drawings for a redesign of the company’s packaging.