Following his graduation from the Carnegie Institute in 1949, where he obtained a degree in Pictorial Design, he moved to New York City with aspirations to become a famed commercial artist. He began his career as an illustrator, creating advertisements for some of the top-name brands, such as Glamour, Tiffany & Co., Columbia Records, and Vogue. The technique used to create these ink drawings involved a process he developed in college that would foreshadow his later career works. In the technique, he combined drawing with printmaking in order to repeat images with small changes that stayed within a similar theme. Due to his financial success in this field, he was able to explore other artistic ventures. Warhol quickly became obsessed with repetitive imagery and adopted screen printing as his primary medium. He found that this method required studio assistants so he could work on a mass scale and in large sizes. This kind of production line method of creating art would lead to his studio becoming known simply as “The Factory” by the summer of 1964 when the Factory created the Flowers series, at a rate of 80 prints per day and over 900 prints total. By the time Warhol moved to a second studio location later that year, his studio was widely known as “The Factory,” which became infamous for the wild parties he would throw there throughout the Sixties. People would come from all over to this social hotspot, where they could interact, hang out, and even watch Warhol in the act of creating his legendary silkscreens.

During the 1960s, Warhol, like other Pop artists, used everyday life as his source material. Infatuated with the consumerism and mass production of the Sixties, Warhol placed ordinary products and commercial items into the sphere of fine art. 1961 was a pivotal year for the artist, who at the time was still producing highly sought-after advertisements for print media and fashion magazines but also began to spend more time working independently as an artist and painter. His 1961 “Newspaper Advertisement” series, which Watches belongs to, serves as a precursor to the graphic sensibility of his very first Campbell’s Soup paintings completed later that same year. Warhol’s paintings of these advertisements depict an array of consumer products including a television set, vacuum cleaner, shoes, refrigerator, and watches – all of which were drawn from print advertisements and signaled the modern comforts of American middle-class life. Later that year, he expanded on his comics and ad paintings, creating a group of Coca-Cola works that proved pivotal to his career, marking the artist’s transition to his signature method of image reproduction through silkscreens. Acting as a bridge between Warhol’s hand-painted works and his silkscreens, these works all retain traces of the artist’s process, including elements of the work that are handmade as well as produced by silkscreen. As for the subject matter, the Coke bottle served as an especially fitting subject for the period; as Warhol explained,

 “What’s grand about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest... you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and, just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke.”

The coke was a symbol of democracy; a means of both criticizing and glorifying the consumerist idols and values of America’s media-saturated postwar culture. During this period of the early 1960s, Warhol would also produce his Campbell's Soup Cans and his box sculptures, which would include the Brillo Boxes, Heinz Boxes, and more.