Diamond Dust Candy Box, 1981 by Andy Warhol
- Untitled Art Gallery
- Mar 18, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 16
Diamond Dust Candy Box, 1981; Synthetic polymer paint, diamond dust, and silkscreen ink on canvas; Stamped with the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts stamps; Numbered VF PA13.005 on the overlap; Numbered twice 'PA13.005' on the stretcher; Size - Canvas: 14 x 10", Frame 17 x 13 1/4"; Framed using a black wood frame and plexiglass.
"You take some chocolate... and you take two pieces of bread... and you put the candy in the middle and you make a sandwich of it. And that would be cake." - Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dusted Chocolate Box exemplifies the artist’s late-career fascination with glamour, luxury, and the commodification of desire. Produced in the early 1980s, the work belongs to a larger series of glittering paintings and prints enhanced with pulverized glass—popularly known as “diamond dust.” Though visually dazzling, the series extends Warhol’s long-standing exploration of consumer goods, advertising, and the seductive promises embedded in American mass culture. By transforming a seemingly ordinary, sentimental object—a box of chocolates—into a sparkling, iconic image, Warhol elevates a disposable consumer gift into a symbol of romance, indulgence, and spectacle.
The diamond dust itself is central to the painting’s effect. Far from decorative excess, it is integral to Warhol’s conceptual strategy. The shimmering surface catches and scatters light as the viewer moves, creating an almost cinematic flicker that draws attention to the work’s tactile and optical richness. This glittering sheen echoes the glamorization techniques of commercial photography, where products are made to appear more luxurious and desirable than they truly are. In Diamond Dusted Chocolate Box, the dust becomes a metaphor for the illusions of perfection sold by advertising—luxury as a thin, sparkling veneer masking the mass-produced reality beneath.
The subject matter also reflects Warhol’s recurring interest in consumption, pleasure, and repetition. Like soup cans, Brillo boxes, or celebrity faces, chocolates are items meant for mass circulation, yet they are also loaded with intimate cultural associations: romance, gift-giving, and Valentine’s Day rituals. Warhol exploits the tension between the personal and the industrial. Rendered through the silkscreen process, the candy box becomes standardized and flattened, its romance undercut by its status as a commodity. The glittering dust promises sweetness and decadence, yet the mechanical reproduction keeps the object at a cool, Pop-art distance. Warhol thus illuminates the ways sentimental items are packaged, marketed, and idealized.
This embrace of surface and spectacle is characteristic of Warhol’s work from the 1980s, a decade defined by material excess, celebrity culture, and the aesthetics of high fashion. Warhol increasingly adopted a visual language that mirrored these cultural currents. His use of diamond dust—an idea suggested by his friend and collector John Reinhold—became one of his signatures during this period. Pulverized glass standing in for “diamonds” allowed Warhol to playfully blur the boundaries between high and low culture, elevating everyday objects into glittering icons while simultaneously questioning notions of authenticity, value, and luxury.
Warhol’s interest in candy was not purely conceptual. He had a well-known sweet tooth and frequented Serendipity on the Upper East Side for its frozen hot chocolate. Reflecting on his childhood, he once remarked, “When I was a child I never had a fantasy about having a maid—what I had a fantasy about having was candy… As you get older, of course, you get more realistic.” This personal affection for sweets resurfaced in the 1980s when he created a group of paintings and prints depicting both wrapped and unwrapped chocolate boxes. Some works present the heart-shaped boxes popularized by Richard Cadbury, while others—such as Diamond Dusted Chocolate Box—reveal the chocolates themselves, their glittering surfaces made even more delectable through the use of diamond dust.
Warhol’s relationship with the Reinhold family, who inspired his use of diamond dust, extended beyond materials. He painted portraits of John Reinhold and of John and Susan Reinhold’s daughter, Berkeley. In 1981, Warhol gifted Berkeley an 80-page leather diary filled with drawings that slowly evolved page-by-page into a dollar sign; the diary was later reproduced by Rizzoli in 2010 as Andy Warhol: Making Money. These personal connections underscore how certain themes—money, luxury, glamour, and desire—continually shaped Warhol’s artistic imagination.
Diamond Dusted Chocolate Box is an exceptional example of Warhol’s late Pop practice at its most seductive and incisive. The open box of glittering chocolates is instantly recognizable and almost irresistibly appealing. Its inconsistent silkscreening recalls the rougher textures of Warhol’s 1960s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn paintings, connecting his later indulgent surfaces to his earlier experiments in mechanical reproduction. The result is a work that is both delectable and critical, glamorous and ironic.
In this way, Diamond Dusted Chocolate Box stands as a quintessential Warhol creation—shimmering, playful, conceptually sharp, and deeply reflective of the consumer culture it mirrors. It transforms an everyday candy box into a luminous object of desire, exposing the glittering promises of mass media while reveling in their allure.
Video of the surface of "Diamond Dust Candy Box" 1981 by Andy Warhol
