Campbell's Soup Cans
Encyclopedia
Campbell's Soup Cans, which is sometimes referred to as 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, is a work of art
produced in 1962 by Andy Warhol
. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (508 mm) in height × 16 inches (406.4 mm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup
can—one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The individual paintings were produced by a printmaking
method—the semi-mechanized silkscreen process, using a non-painterly
style. Campbell's Soup Cans reliance on themes from popular culture
helped to usher in pop art
as a major art movement
in the USA.
Warhol, a commercial illustrator
who became a successful author, publisher, painter, and film director, showed the work on July 9, 1962 in his first one-man gallery
exhibition as a fine artist. in the Ferus Gallery
of Los Angeles, California. The exhibition marked the West Coast
debut of pop art. The combination of the semi-mechanized process, the non-painterly
style, and the commercial subject initially caused offense, as the work's blatantly mundane commercialism represented a direct affront to the technique and philosophy of abstract expressionism
. In the United States the abstract expressionism art movement was dominant during the post-war
period, and it held not only to "fine art
" values and aesthetics
but also to a mystical
inclination. This controversy led to a great deal of debate about the merits and ethics of such work. Warhol's motives as an artist were questioned, and they continue to be topical to this day. The large public commotion helped transform Warhol from being an accomplished 1950s commercial illustrator to a notable fine artist, and it helped distinguish him from other rising pop artists. Although commercial demand for his paintings was not immediate, Warhol's association with the subject led to his name becoming synonymous with the Campbell's Soup can paintings.
Warhol subsequently produced a wide variety of art works
depicting Campbell's Soup cans during three distinct phases of his career, and he produced other works using a variety of images from the world of commerce and mass media. Today, the Campbell's Soup cans theme is generally used in reference to the original set of paintings as well as the later Warhol drawings and paintings depicting Campbell's Soup cans. Because of the eventual popularity of the entire series of similarly themed works, Warhol's reputation grew to the point where he was not only the most-renowned American pop art artist, but also the highest-priced living American artist.
at Carnegie Institute of Technology
. He quickly achieved success as a commercial illustrator, and his first published drawing appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of Glamour Magazine
. In 1952, he had his first art gallery show at the Bodley Gallery
with a display of Truman Capote
-inspired works. By 1955, he was tracing photographs borrowed from the New York Public Library
's photo collection with the hired assistance of Nathan Gluck, and reproducing them with a process he had developed earlier as a collegian at Carnegie Tech. His process, which foreshadowed his later work, involved pressing wet ink illustrations against adjoining paper. During the 50s, he had regular showings of his drawings. He even exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art
(Recent Drawings, 1956).
In 1960, Warhol began producing his first canvases, which he based on comic strip subjects. In late 1961, he learned the process of silkscreening from Floriano Vecchi, who had run the Tiber Press since 1953. Though the process generally begins with a stencil
drawing, it often evolves from a blown up photograph which is then transferred with glue onto silk. In either case, one needs to produce a glue-based version of a positive two-dimensional image (positive means that open spaces are left where the paint will appear). Usually, the ink is rolled across the medium so that it passes through the silk and not the glue. Campbell’s Soup cans were among Warhol's first silkscreen productions; the first were U.S. dollar bills
. The pieces were made from stencils; one for each color. Warhol did not begin to convert photographs to silkscreens until after the original series of Campbell’s Soup cans had been produced.
Although Warhol had produced silkscreens of comic strips and of other pop art
subjects, he supposedly relegated himself to soup cans as a subject at the time to avoid competing with the more finished style of comics by Roy Lichtenstein
. In fact, he once said "I've got to do something that really will have a lot of impact that will be different enough from Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist
, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing." In February 1962, Lichtenstein displayed at a sold-out exhibition of cartoon
pictures at Leo Castelli
's eponymous Leo Castelli Gallery, ending the possibility of Warhol exhibiting his own cartoon paintings. In fact, Castelli had visited Warhol's gallery in 1961 and said that the work he saw there was too similar to Lichtenstein's, although Warhol's and Lichtenstein’s comic artwork differed in subject and techniques (e.g., Warhol’s comic-strip figures were humorous pop culture caricatures such as Popeye
, while Lichtenstein’s were generally of stereotypical hero and heroines, inspired by comic strips devoted to adventure and romance). Castelli chose not to represent both artists at that time, but he would, in 1964, exhibit Warhol works such as reproductions of Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964 (pictured above, left), and Brillo Soap Boxes. He would again exhibit Warhol's work in 1966. Lichtenstein's 1962 show was quickly followed by Wayne Thiebaud
’s April 17, 1962 one man show at the Allan Stone Gallery featuring all-American foods, which agitated Warhol as he felt it jeopardized his own food-related soup can works. Warhol was considering returning to the Bodley gallery, but the Bodley's director did not like his pop art works. In 1961, Warhol was offered a three-man show by Allan Stone at the latter's 18 East 82nd Street Gallery with Rosenquist and Robert Indiana
, but all three were insulted by this proposition.
Irving Blum was the first dealer to show Warhol’s soup can paintings. Blum happened to be visiting Warhol in May 1962, at a time when Warhol was being featured in a May 11, 1962 Time Magazine article
"The Slice-of-Cake School" (that included a portion of Warhol's silkscreened 200 One Dollar Bills), along with Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Wayne Thiebaud
. Warhol was the only artist whose photograph actually appeared in the article, which is indicative of his knack for manipulating the mass media. Blum saw dozens of Campbell’s Soup can variations, including a grid of One-Hundred Soup Cans that day. Blum was shocked that Warhol had no gallery
arrangement and offered him a July show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. This would be Warhol’s first one man show of his pop art. Warhol was assured by Blum that the newly founded Artforum
magazine, which had an office above the gallery, would cover the show. Not only was the show Warhol's first solo gallery exhibit, but it was considered to be the West Coast premiere of pop art. Andy Warhol's first New York solo Pop exhibit was hosted at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery November 6–24, 1962. The exhibit included the works Marilyn Diptych
, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles, and 100 Dollar Bills.
Warhol sent Blum thirty-two 20 inches (508 mm) x 16 inches (406.4 mm) canvases of Campbell’s Soup can portraits, each representing a particular variety of the Campbell’s Soup flavors available at the time. The thirty-two canvases are very similar: each is a realistic depiction of the iconic, mostly red and white Campbell's Soup can silkscreened onto a white background. The canvases have minor variation in the lettering of the variety names. Most of the letterings are painted in red letters. Four varieties have black lettering: Clam Chowder has parenthetical black lettering below the variety name that said (Manhattan Style), which means that the soup is tomato- and broth-based instead of the cream-based New England style; Beef has parenthetical black lettering below the variety name that says (With Vegetables and Barley); Scotch Broth has parenthetical black lettering below the variety name that said (A Hearty Soup); and Minestrone had black parenthetical lettering saying (Italian-Style Vegetable Soup). There are two varieties with red lettered parenthetical labels: Beef Broth (Bouillon) and Consommé (Beef). The font sizes only vary slightly in the variety names. However, there are a few notable stylistic font differences. Old-fashioned Tomato Rice is the only variety with lower case script. This lower case script appears to be from a slightly different font than the other variety name letters. There are other stylistic differences. Old-fashioned Tomato Rice has the word Soup depicted lower on the can, in place of a portion of ornamental starlike symbols at the bottom that the other 31 varieties have. Also, Cheddar Cheese has two banner-like addenda. In the middle-left, a small golden banner says New!, and a middle center golden banner says Great As A Sauce Too!.
The exhibition
opened July 9, 1962 with Warhol in absentia
. The thirty-two single soup can canvases were placed in a single line, much like products on shelves, each displayed on narrow individual ledges. The contemporary impact was uneventful, but the historical impact is considered today to have been a watershed. The gallery audience was unsure what to make of the exhibit. A John Coplans
Artform article, which was in part spurred on by the responding display of dozens of soup cans by a nearby gallery with a display advertising them at three for 60 cents, encouraged people to take a stand on Warhol. Few actually saw the paintings at the Los Angeles exhibit or at Warhol’s studio
, but word spread in the form of controversy and scandal due to the works seeming attempt to replicate the appearance of manufactured objects
. Extended debate on the merits and ethics of focusing one's efforts on such a mundane commercial inanimate model kept Warhol's work in art world conversations. The pundits could not believe an artist would reduce the art form to the equivalent of a trip to the local grocery store. Talk did not translate into monetary success for Warhol. Dennis Hopper
was the first of only a half dozen to pay $100 for a canvas. Blum decided to try to keep the thirty-two canvases as an intact set and bought back the few sales. This pleased Warhol who had conceived of them as a set, and he agreed to sell the set for ten monthly $100 installments to Blum. Warhol had passed the milestone of his first serious art show. While this exhibition was on view in Los Angeles, Martha Jackson canceled another planned December 1962 New York exhibition.
The Ferus show closed on August 4, 1962, the day before Marilyn Monroe
’s death. Warhol went on to purchase a Monroe publicity still from the film Niagara, which he later cropped and used to create one of his most well-known works: his painting of Marilyn. Although Warhol continued painting other pop art, including Martinson’s coffee cans, Coca-Cola
bottles, S&H Green Stamps
, and Campbell’s Soup cans, he soon became known to many as the artist who painted celebrities. He returned to Blum’s gallery to exhibit Elvis
and Liz
in October 1963. His fans Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward
(Hopper's wife at the time) held a welcoming party for the event.
Since Warhol gave no indication of a definitive ordering of the collection, the sequence chosen by MoMA
(in the picture at the upper right of this article) in the display from their permanent collection
reflects the chronological order in which the varieties were introduced by the Campbell Soup Company, beginning with Tomato in the upper left, which debuted in 1897. By April 2011, the curators at the MoMA had reordered the varieties, moving Clam Chowder to the upper left and tomato to the bottom of the four row.
Several anecdotal
stories supposedly explain why Warhol chose Campbell's Soup cans as the focal point of his pop art. One reason is that he needed a new subject after he abandoned comic strips, a move taken in part due to his respect for the refined work of Roy Lichtenstein
. According to Ted Carey—one of Warhol's commercial art assistants in the late fifties—it was Muriel Latow who suggested the idea for both the soup cans and Warhol's early U.S. dollar paintings.
Muriel Latow was then an aspiring interior decorator, and owner of the Latow Art Gallery in the East 60s
in Manhattan. She told Warhol that he should paint "Something you see every day and something that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell's Soup." Ted Carey, who was there at the time, said that Warhol responded by exclaiming: "Oh that sounds fabulous." According to Carey, Warhol went to a supermarket the following day and bought a case of "all the soups", which Carey said he saw when he stopped by Warhol's apartment the next day. When the art critic G.R. Swenson asked Warhol in 1963 why he painted soup cans, the artist replied, "I used to drink it, I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years."
Another account of Latow's influence on Warhol holds that she asked him what he loved most, and because he replied "money" she suggested that he paint U.S. dollar bills. According to this story, Latow later advised that in addition to painting money he should paint something else very simple, such as Campbell's Soup cans.
In an interview for London's The Face
in 1985, David Yarritu asked Warhol about flowers that Warhol's mother made from tin can
s. In his response, Warhol mentioned them as one of the reasons behind his first tin can paintings:
Several stories mention that Warhol's choice of soup cans reflected his own avid devotion to Campbell's soup as a consumer. Robert Indiana
once said: "I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup." He was thought to have focused on them because they composed a daily dietary staple. Others observed that Warhol merely painted things he held close at heart
. He enjoyed eating Campbell's soup, had a taste for Coca-Cola, loved money, and admired movie stars. Thus, they all became subjects of his work. Yet another account says that his daily lunches in his studio consisted of Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola, and thus, his inspiration came from seeing the empty cans and bottles accumulate on his desk.
Warhol did not choose the cans because of business relationships with the Campbell Soup Company. Even though the company at the time sold four out of every five cans of prepared soup in the United States, Warhol preferred that the company not be involved "because the whole point would be lost with any kind of commercial tie-in
." However, by 1965, the company knew him well enough that he was able to coax actual can labels from them to use as invitations for an exhibit. They even commissioned a canvas.
Warhol had a positive view of ordinary culture and felt the abstract expressionists had taken great pains to ignore the splendor of modernity
. The Campbell's Soup Can series, along with his other series, provided him with a chance to express his positive view of modern culture. However, his deadpan
manner endeavored to be devoid of emotional and social commentary. In fact, the work was intended to be without personality or individual expression. Warhol’s view is encapsulated in the quote ". . . a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed to canvas, become Art."
His pop art work differed from serial works by artists such as Monet, who used series to represent discriminating perception
and show that a painter could recreate shifts in time, light, season, and weather with hand and eye. Warhol is now understood to represent the modern era of commercialization and indiscriminate "sameness." When Warhol eventually showed variation it was not "realistic." His later variations in color were almost a mockery
of discriminating perception. His adoption of the pseudo-industrial silkscreen process spoke against the use of a series to demonstrate subtlety. Warhol sought to reject invention and nuance by creating the appearance that his work had been printed, and in fact, he systematically recreated imperfections. His series work helped him escape Lichtenstein’s lengthening shadow. Although his soup cans were not as shocking and vulgar as some of his other early pop art, they still offended the art world's sensibilities that had developed so as to partake in the intimate emotions of artistic expression.
Contrasting against Caravaggio
’s sensual baskets of fruit, Chardin
’s plush peaches, or Cezanne’s vibrant arrangements of apples, the mundane Campbell’s Soup Cans gave the art world a chill. Furthermore, the idea of isolating eminently recognizable pop culture items was ridiculous enough to the art world that both the merits and ethics of the work were perfectly reasonable debate topics for those who had not even seen the piece. Warhol’s pop art can be seen as a relation to Minimal art in the sense that it attempts to portray objects in their most simple, immediately recognizable form. Pop art eliminates overtones and undertones that would otherwise be associated with representations.
Warhol clearly changed the concept of art appreciation. Instead of harmonious three-dimensional arrangements of objects, he chose mechanical derivatives of commercial illustration with an emphasis on the packaging. His variations of multiple soup cans, for example, made the process of repetition an appreciated technique: "If you take a Campbell’s Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. According to Marcel Duchamp
, what interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell’s Soup cans on a canvas." The regimented multiple can depictions almost become an abstraction whose details are less important than the panorama. In a sense, the representation was more important than that which was represented. Warhol's interest in machinelike creation during his early pop art days was misunderstood by those in the art world, whose value system was threatened by mechanization.
In Europe, audiences had a very different take on his work. Many perceived it as a subversive and Marxist
satire on American capitalism. If not subversive, it was at least considered a Marxist critique of pop culture. Given Warhol’s apolitical outlook in general this is not likely the true message. In fact, it is likely that his pop art was nothing more than an attempt to attract attention to his work.
In an effort to complement the message of his art, Warhol developed a pop persona after the mass media took note of his pop art. He began to manifest a teenage-like image, immersing himself in pop culture such as Rock & Roll shows and fan magazines. Whereas previous artists used repetition to demonstrate their skill at depicting variation, Warhol coupled "repetition" with "monotony" as he professed his love of artwork themes.
s, peeling labels, crushed bodies, or opened lids
like those in the images in this section. Sometimes he added related items like a bowl of soup or a can opener, such as the one in the image on the right. Sometimes he produced images of related items without any soup cans such as Campbell's Tomato Juice Box (above right), which are not strictly a part of the series although a part of the theme. Many of these works
were produced at his famous studio "The Factory
."
Irving Blum made the original thirty-two canvases available to the public through an arrangement with the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, DC by placing them on permanent loan two days before Warhol's death. However, the original Campbell's Soup Cans is now a part of the Museum of Modern Art
permanent collection. A print called Campbell's Soup Cans II
is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Chicago. 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962 (Acrylic on canvas, 72 inches x 100 inches), in the private collection of John and Kimiko Powers is the largest single canvas of the Campbell's Soup can paintings. It is composed of ten rows and twenty columns of numerous flavors of soups. Experts point to it as one of the most significant works of pop art both as a pop representation and as conjunction with immediate predecessors such as Jasper Johns
and the successors movements of Minimal and Conceptual art. The very similar 100 Cans from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
collection is shown above on the left. The earliest soup can painting seems to be Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato Rice), a 1960 ink, tempera, crayon, and oil canvas.
In many of the works, including the original series, Warhol drastically simplified the gold medallion that appears on Campbell's Soup cans by replacing the paired allegorical figures with a flat yellow disk. In most variations, the only hint of three-dimensionality came from the shading on the tin lid. Otherwise the image was flat. The works with torn labels are perceived as metaphors of life in the sense that even packaged food must meet its end. They are often described as expressionistic.
By 1970, Warhol established the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist with a $60,000 sale of Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Torn Label (Vegetable Beef) (1962) in a sale at Parke-Bernet, the preeminent American auction house of the day (later acquired by Sotheby's
). This record was broken a few months later by his rival for the artworld's attention and approval, Lichtenstein, who sold a depiction of a giant brush stroke, Big Painting No. 6 (1965) for $75,000.
In May 2006, Warhol’s Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) (1962) sold for $11,776,000 and set the current auction
world record
for a painting from the Campbell Soup can series. The painting was purchased for the collection of Eli Broad
, a man who once set the record for the largest credit card
transaction when he purchased Lichtenstein's "I … I'm Sorry" for $2.5 million with an American Express
card. The $11.8 million Warhol sale was part of the Christie's
Sales of Impressionist, Modern
, Post-War and Contemporary
Art for the Spring Season of 2006 that totaled $438,768,924.
The broad variety of work produced using a semi-mechanized process with many collaborators, Warhol's popularity, the value of his works, and the diversity of works across various media and genre have created a need for the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board
to certify the authenticity
of works by Warhol.
Warhol's production of Campbell's Soup can works underwent three distinct phases. The first took place in 1962, during which he created realistic images, and produced numerous pencil drawings of the subject. In 1965, Warhol revisited the theme while arbitrarily replacing the original red and white colors with a wider variety of hues. In the late 1970s, he again returned to the soup cans while inverting
and reversing the images. Some in the art world consider Warhol's work completed after his 1968 shooting—which occurred the day before the Bobby Kennedy assassination— to be less significant than that done before it.
Today, the most well remembered Warhol Campbell's Soup can works are from the first phase. Warhol is further regarded for his iconic serial celebrity silkscreens of such people as Elvis Presley
, Marilyn Monroe
, Liz Taylor, and Mao Zedong
, produced during his 1962–1964 silkscreening phase. In fact, his most commonly repeated painting subjects are Taylor, Monroe, Presley, Jackie Kennedy and similar celebrities. In addition to being a notable fine artist, Warhol was a renowned cinematographer, author, and commercial illustrator. Posthumously, he became the subject of the largest single-artist art museum in the United States. Many Warhol art exhibits include footage of his cinematic directorial efforts (e.g., The Museum of Contemporary Art's ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, Disasters, 1962–1964 that ran from March 18, 2006 – June 18, 2006). Some say his contributions as an artist pale in comparison to his contributions as a film-maker. Others make it clear that he was not the most conventionally skilled artist of his day. Nonetheless, his techniques were emulated by other highly respected artists and his works continue to command high prices.
Work of art
A work of art, artwork, art piece, or art object is an aesthetic item or artistic creation.The term "a work of art" can apply to:*an example of fine art, such as a painting or sculpture*a fine work of architecture or landscape design...
produced in 1962 by Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (508 mm) in height × 16 inches (406.4 mm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup
Campbell Soup Company
Campbell Soup Company , also known as Campbell's, is an American producer of canned soups and related products. Campbell's products are sold in 120 countries around the world. It is headquartered in Camden, New Jersey...
can—one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The individual paintings were produced by a printmaking
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
method—the semi-mechanized silkscreen process, using a non-painterly
Painterly
Painterliness is a translation of the German term , a word popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in order to help focus, enrich and standardize the terms being used by art historians of his time to characterize works of art...
style. Campbell's Soup Cans reliance on themes from popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
helped to usher in pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
as a major art movement
Art movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...
in the USA.
Warhol, a commercial illustrator
Illustrator
An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...
who became a successful author, publisher, painter, and film director, showed the work on July 9, 1962 in his first one-man gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
exhibition as a fine artist. in the Ferus Gallery
Ferus Gallery
The Ferus Gallery was a contemporary art gallery operating from 1957-1966. In 1957 it was located at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California...
of Los Angeles, California. The exhibition marked the West Coast
West Coast of the United States
West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...
debut of pop art. The combination of the semi-mechanized process, the non-painterly
Painterly
Painterliness is a translation of the German term , a word popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in order to help focus, enrich and standardize the terms being used by art historians of his time to characterize works of art...
style, and the commercial subject initially caused offense, as the work's blatantly mundane commercialism represented a direct affront to the technique and philosophy of abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. In the United States the abstract expressionism art movement was dominant during the post-war
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
period, and it held not only to "fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
" values and aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
but also to a mystical
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
inclination. This controversy led to a great deal of debate about the merits and ethics of such work. Warhol's motives as an artist were questioned, and they continue to be topical to this day. The large public commotion helped transform Warhol from being an accomplished 1950s commercial illustrator to a notable fine artist, and it helped distinguish him from other rising pop artists. Although commercial demand for his paintings was not immediate, Warhol's association with the subject led to his name becoming synonymous with the Campbell's Soup can paintings.
Warhol subsequently produced a wide variety of art works
Work of art
A work of art, artwork, art piece, or art object is an aesthetic item or artistic creation.The term "a work of art" can apply to:*an example of fine art, such as a painting or sculpture*a fine work of architecture or landscape design...
depicting Campbell's Soup cans during three distinct phases of his career, and he produced other works using a variety of images from the world of commerce and mass media. Today, the Campbell's Soup cans theme is generally used in reference to the original set of paintings as well as the later Warhol drawings and paintings depicting Campbell's Soup cans. Because of the eventual popularity of the entire series of similarly themed works, Warhol's reputation grew to the point where he was not only the most-renowned American pop art artist, but also the highest-priced living American artist.
New York art scene
Warhol arrived in New York City in 1949, directly from the School of Fine ArtsCarnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts
The College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA oversees the Schools of Architecture, Art, Design, Drama, and Music; along with its associated centers, studios, and galleries....
at Carnegie Institute of Technology
Carnegie Institute of Technology
The Carnegie Institute of Technology , is the name for Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. It was first called the Carnegie Technical Schools, or Carnegie Tech, when it was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie who intended to build a “first class technical school” in Pittsburgh,...
. He quickly achieved success as a commercial illustrator, and his first published drawing appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of Glamour Magazine
Glamour (magazine)
Glamour is a women's magazine published by Condé Nast Publications. Founded in 1939 in the United States, it was originally called Glamour of Hollywood....
. In 1952, he had his first art gallery show at the Bodley Gallery
Bodley Gallery
The Bodley Gallery was a prominent art gallery in New York City, USA, from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. The Bodley specialized in contemporary and modern art. David Mann was director of the gallery during its heyday and Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Braun The Bodley Gallery was a prominent art...
with a display of Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
-inspired works. By 1955, he was tracing photographs borrowed from the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
's photo collection with the hired assistance of Nathan Gluck, and reproducing them with a process he had developed earlier as a collegian at Carnegie Tech. His process, which foreshadowed his later work, involved pressing wet ink illustrations against adjoining paper. During the 50s, he had regular showings of his drawings. He even exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(Recent Drawings, 1956).
Pop art
Stencil
A stencil is a thin sheet of material, such as paper, plastic, or metal, with letters or a design cut from it, used to produce the letters or design on an underlying surface by applying pigment through the cut-out holes in the material. The key advantage of a stencil is that it can be reused to...
drawing, it often evolves from a blown up photograph which is then transferred with glue onto silk. In either case, one needs to produce a glue-based version of a positive two-dimensional image (positive means that open spaces are left where the paint will appear). Usually, the ink is rolled across the medium so that it passes through the silk and not the glue. Campbell’s Soup cans were among Warhol's first silkscreen productions; the first were U.S. dollar bills
United States one-dollar bill
The United States one-dollar bill is the most common denomination of US currency. The first president, George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart, is currently featured on the obverse, while the Great Seal of the United States is featured on the reverse. The one-dollar bill has the oldest...
. The pieces were made from stencils; one for each color. Warhol did not begin to convert photographs to silkscreens until after the original series of Campbell’s Soup cans had been produced.
_1962_pencil_on_paper.jpg) |
Although Warhol had produced silkscreens of comic strips and of other pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
subjects, he supposedly relegated himself to soup cans as a subject at the time to avoid competing with the more finished style of comics by Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
. In fact, he once said "I've got to do something that really will have a lot of impact that will be different enough from Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...
, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing." In February 1962, Lichtenstein displayed at a sold-out exhibition of cartoon
Cartoon
A cartoon is a form of two-dimensional illustrated visual art. While the specific definition has changed over time, modern usage refers to a typically non-realistic or semi-realistic drawing or painting intended for satire, caricature, or humor, or to the artistic style of such works...
pictures at Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...
's eponymous Leo Castelli Gallery, ending the possibility of Warhol exhibiting his own cartoon paintings. In fact, Castelli had visited Warhol's gallery in 1961 and said that the work he saw there was too similar to Lichtenstein's, although Warhol's and Lichtenstein’s comic artwork differed in subject and techniques (e.g., Warhol’s comic-strip figures were humorous pop culture caricatures such as Popeye
Popeye
Popeye the Sailor is a cartoon fictional character created by Elzie Crisler Segar, who has appeared in comic strips and animated cartoons in the cinema as well as on television. He first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929...
, while Lichtenstein’s were generally of stereotypical hero and heroines, inspired by comic strips devoted to adventure and romance). Castelli chose not to represent both artists at that time, but he would, in 1964, exhibit Warhol works such as reproductions of Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964 (pictured above, left), and Brillo Soap Boxes. He would again exhibit Warhol's work in 1966. Lichtenstein's 1962 show was quickly followed by Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...
’s April 17, 1962 one man show at the Allan Stone Gallery featuring all-American foods, which agitated Warhol as he felt it jeopardized his own food-related soup can works. Warhol was considering returning to the Bodley gallery, but the Bodley's director did not like his pop art works. In 1961, Warhol was offered a three-man show by Allan Stone at the latter's 18 East 82nd Street Gallery with Rosenquist and Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana is an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement.-Life and work:Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana. His family relocated to Indianapolis, where he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School...
, but all three were insulted by this proposition.
Irving Blum was the first dealer to show Warhol’s soup can paintings. Blum happened to be visiting Warhol in May 1962, at a time when Warhol was being featured in a May 11, 1962 Time Magazine article
Article (publishing)
An article is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating the news, research results, academic analysis or debate.-News articles:...
"The Slice-of-Cake School" (that included a portion of Warhol's silkscreened 200 One Dollar Bills), along with Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...
. Warhol was the only artist whose photograph actually appeared in the article, which is indicative of his knack for manipulating the mass media. Blum saw dozens of Campbell’s Soup can variations, including a grid of One-Hundred Soup Cans that day. Blum was shocked that Warhol had no gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
arrangement and offered him a July show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. This would be Warhol’s first one man show of his pop art. Warhol was assured by Blum that the newly founded Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
magazine, which had an office above the gallery, would cover the show. Not only was the show Warhol's first solo gallery exhibit, but it was considered to be the West Coast premiere of pop art. Andy Warhol's first New York solo Pop exhibit was hosted at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery November 6–24, 1962. The exhibit included the works Marilyn Diptych
Marilyn Diptych
The Marilyn Diptych is a silkscreen painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol.-History and analysis:The work was completed during the weeks after Marilyn Monroe's death in August 1962...
, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles, and 100 Dollar Bills.
The premiere
The exhibition
Art exhibition
Art exhibitions are traditionally the space in which art objects meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is rarely true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" or...
opened July 9, 1962 with Warhol in absentia
In absentia
In absentia is Latin for "in the absence". In legal use, it usually means a trial at which the defendant is not physically present. The phrase is not ordinarily a mere observation, but suggests recognition of violation to a defendant's right to be present in court proceedings in a criminal trial.In...
. The thirty-two single soup can canvases were placed in a single line, much like products on shelves, each displayed on narrow individual ledges. The contemporary impact was uneventful, but the historical impact is considered today to have been a watershed. The gallery audience was unsure what to make of the exhibit. A John Coplans
John Coplans
John Coplans was a British artist. A veteran of World War II and a photographer, he emigrated to the United States in 1960 and had many exhibitions in Europe and North America...
Artform article, which was in part spurred on by the responding display of dozens of soup cans by a nearby gallery with a display advertising them at three for 60 cents, encouraged people to take a stand on Warhol. Few actually saw the paintings at the Los Angeles exhibit or at Warhol’s studio
Studio
A studio is an artist's or worker's workroom, or the catchall term for an artist and his or her employees who work within that studio. This can be for the purpose of architecture, painting, pottery , sculpture, scrapbooking, photography, graphic design, filmmaking, animation, radio or television...
, but word spread in the form of controversy and scandal due to the works seeming attempt to replicate the appearance of manufactured objects
Object (philosophy)
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
. Extended debate on the merits and ethics of focusing one's efforts on such a mundane commercial inanimate model kept Warhol's work in art world conversations. The pundits could not believe an artist would reduce the art form to the equivalent of a trip to the local grocery store. Talk did not translate into monetary success for Warhol. Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...
was the first of only a half dozen to pay $100 for a canvas. Blum decided to try to keep the thirty-two canvases as an intact set and bought back the few sales. This pleased Warhol who had conceived of them as a set, and he agreed to sell the set for ten monthly $100 installments to Blum. Warhol had passed the milestone of his first serious art show. While this exhibition was on view in Los Angeles, Martha Jackson canceled another planned December 1962 New York exhibition.
The Ferus show closed on August 4, 1962, the day before Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
’s death. Warhol went on to purchase a Monroe publicity still from the film Niagara, which he later cropped and used to create one of his most well-known works: his painting of Marilyn. Although Warhol continued painting other pop art, including Martinson’s coffee cans, Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...
bottles, S&H Green Stamps
S&H Green Stamps
S&H Green Stamps were trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson company , founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson...
, and Campbell’s Soup cans, he soon became known to many as the artist who painted celebrities. He returned to Blum’s gallery to exhibit Elvis
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
and Liz
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...
in October 1963. His fans Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward
Brooke Hayward
Brooke Hayward is an American actress and writer.-Early life and career:Born in Los Angeles, Hayward is the eldest, and only surviving, child from the marriage of former agent turned film-, television-, and stage producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan...
(Hopper's wife at the time) held a welcoming party for the event.
Since Warhol gave no indication of a definitive ordering of the collection, the sequence chosen by MoMA
Moma
Moma may refer to:* Moma , an owlet moth genus* Moma Airport, a Russian public airport* Moma District, Nampula, Mozambique* Moma River, a right tributary of the Indigirka River* Google Moma, the Google corporate intranet...
(in the picture at the upper right of this article) in the display from their permanent collection
Collection (museum)
A museum is distinguished by a collection of often unique objects that forms the core of its activities for exhibitions, education, research, etc. This differentiates it from an archive or library, where the contents may be more paper-based, replaceable and less exhibition oriented...
reflects the chronological order in which the varieties were introduced by the Campbell Soup Company, beginning with Tomato in the upper left, which debuted in 1897. By April 2011, the curators at the MoMA had reordered the varieties, moving Clam Chowder to the upper left and tomato to the bottom of the four row.
Motivation
Anecdote
An anecdote is a short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is always presented as based on a real incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, usually in an identifiable place...
stories supposedly explain why Warhol chose Campbell's Soup cans as the focal point of his pop art. One reason is that he needed a new subject after he abandoned comic strips, a move taken in part due to his respect for the refined work of Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
. According to Ted Carey—one of Warhol's commercial art assistants in the late fifties—it was Muriel Latow who suggested the idea for both the soup cans and Warhol's early U.S. dollar paintings.
Muriel Latow was then an aspiring interior decorator, and owner of the Latow Art Gallery in the East 60s
Upper East Side
The Upper East Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, between Central Park and the East River. The Upper East Side lies within an area bounded by 59th Street to 96th Street, and the East River to Fifth Avenue-Central Park...
in Manhattan. She told Warhol that he should paint "Something you see every day and something that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell's Soup." Ted Carey, who was there at the time, said that Warhol responded by exclaiming: "Oh that sounds fabulous." According to Carey, Warhol went to a supermarket the following day and bought a case of "all the soups", which Carey said he saw when he stopped by Warhol's apartment the next day. When the art critic G.R. Swenson asked Warhol in 1963 why he painted soup cans, the artist replied, "I used to drink it, I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years."
Another account of Latow's influence on Warhol holds that she asked him what he loved most, and because he replied "money" she suggested that he paint U.S. dollar bills. According to this story, Latow later advised that in addition to painting money he should paint something else very simple, such as Campbell's Soup cans.
In an interview for London's The Face
The Face (magazine)
The Face was a British music, fashion and culture monthly magazine started in May 1980 by Nick Logan.-1980s:Logan had previously created the teen pop magazine Smash Hits, and had been an editor at the New Musical Express in the 1970s before launching The Face in 1980.The magazine was influential in...
in 1985, David Yarritu asked Warhol about flowers that Warhol's mother made from tin can
Tin can
A tin can, tin , steel can, or a can, is a sealed container for the distribution or storage of goods, composed of thin metal. Many cans require opening by cutting the "end" open; others have removable covers. Cans hold diverse contents: foods, beverages, oil, chemicals, etc."Tin" cans are made...
s. In his response, Warhol mentioned them as one of the reasons behind his first tin can paintings:
- David Yarritu: I heard that your mother used to make these little tin flowers and sell them to help support you in the early days.
- Andy Warhol: Oh God, yes, it's true, the tin flowers were made out of those fruit cans, that's the reason why I did my first tin-can paintings … You take a tin-can, the bigger the tin-can the better, like the family size ones that peach halves come in, and I think you cut them with scissors. It's very easy and you just make flowers out of them. My mother always had lots of cans around, including the soup cans.
Several stories mention that Warhol's choice of soup cans reflected his own avid devotion to Campbell's soup as a consumer. Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana is an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement.-Life and work:Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana. His family relocated to Indianapolis, where he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School...
once said: "I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup." He was thought to have focused on them because they composed a daily dietary staple. Others observed that Warhol merely painted things he held close at heart
Heart (symbol)
The heart has long been used as a symbol to refer to the spiritual, emotional, moral, and in the past, also intellectual core of a human being...
. He enjoyed eating Campbell's soup, had a taste for Coca-Cola, loved money, and admired movie stars. Thus, they all became subjects of his work. Yet another account says that his daily lunches in his studio consisted of Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola, and thus, his inspiration came from seeing the empty cans and bottles accumulate on his desk.
Warhol did not choose the cans because of business relationships with the Campbell Soup Company. Even though the company at the time sold four out of every five cans of prepared soup in the United States, Warhol preferred that the company not be involved "because the whole point would be lost with any kind of commercial tie-in
Tie-in
A tie-in is an authorized product based on a media property a company is releasing, such as a movie or video/DVD, computer game, video game, television program/television series, board game, web site, role-playing game or literary property...
." However, by 1965, the company knew him well enough that he was able to coax actual can labels from them to use as invitations for an exhibit. They even commissioned a canvas.
Message
Warhol had a positive view of ordinary culture and felt the abstract expressionists had taken great pains to ignore the splendor of modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
. The Campbell's Soup Can series, along with his other series, provided him with a chance to express his positive view of modern culture. However, his deadpan
Deadpan
Deadpan is a form of comic delivery in which humor is presented without a change in emotion or body language, usually speaking in a casual, monotone, solemn, blunt, disgusted or matter-of-fact voice and expressing an unflappably calm, archly insincere or artificially grave demeanor...
manner endeavored to be devoid of emotional and social commentary. In fact, the work was intended to be without personality or individual expression. Warhol’s view is encapsulated in the quote ". . . a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed to canvas, become Art."
His pop art work differed from serial works by artists such as Monet, who used series to represent discriminating perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
and show that a painter could recreate shifts in time, light, season, and weather with hand and eye. Warhol is now understood to represent the modern era of commercialization and indiscriminate "sameness." When Warhol eventually showed variation it was not "realistic." His later variations in color were almost a mockery
Mockery
Mockery is an American film about the Russian Revolution. It was the second film made in Hollywood by Danish director Benjamin Christensen and starred Lon Chaney, Sr...
of discriminating perception. His adoption of the pseudo-industrial silkscreen process spoke against the use of a series to demonstrate subtlety. Warhol sought to reject invention and nuance by creating the appearance that his work had been printed, and in fact, he systematically recreated imperfections. His series work helped him escape Lichtenstein’s lengthening shadow. Although his soup cans were not as shocking and vulgar as some of his other early pop art, they still offended the art world's sensibilities that had developed so as to partake in the intimate emotions of artistic expression.
Contrasting against Caravaggio
Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...
’s sensual baskets of fruit, Chardin
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was an 18th-century French painter. He is considered a master of still life, and is also noted for his genre paintings which depict kitchen maids, children, and domestic activities...
’s plush peaches, or Cezanne’s vibrant arrangements of apples, the mundane Campbell’s Soup Cans gave the art world a chill. Furthermore, the idea of isolating eminently recognizable pop culture items was ridiculous enough to the art world that both the merits and ethics of the work were perfectly reasonable debate topics for those who had not even seen the piece. Warhol’s pop art can be seen as a relation to Minimal art in the sense that it attempts to portray objects in their most simple, immediately recognizable form. Pop art eliminates overtones and undertones that would otherwise be associated with representations.
Warhol clearly changed the concept of art appreciation. Instead of harmonious three-dimensional arrangements of objects, he chose mechanical derivatives of commercial illustration with an emphasis on the packaging. His variations of multiple soup cans, for example, made the process of repetition an appreciated technique: "If you take a Campbell’s Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. According to Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, what interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell’s Soup cans on a canvas." The regimented multiple can depictions almost become an abstraction whose details are less important than the panorama. In a sense, the representation was more important than that which was represented. Warhol's interest in machinelike creation during his early pop art days was misunderstood by those in the art world, whose value system was threatened by mechanization.
In Europe, audiences had a very different take on his work. Many perceived it as a subversive and Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
satire on American capitalism. If not subversive, it was at least considered a Marxist critique of pop culture. Given Warhol’s apolitical outlook in general this is not likely the true message. In fact, it is likely that his pop art was nothing more than an attempt to attract attention to his work.
In an effort to complement the message of his art, Warhol developed a pop persona after the mass media took note of his pop art. He began to manifest a teenage-like image, immersing himself in pop culture such as Rock & Roll shows and fan magazines. Whereas previous artists used repetition to demonstrate their skill at depicting variation, Warhol coupled "repetition" with "monotony" as he professed his love of artwork themes.
Variations
Warhol followed the success of his original series with several related works incorporating the same theme of Campbell's Soup cans subjects. These subsequent works along with the original are collectively referred to as the Campbell's Soup cans series and often simply as the Campbell's Soup cans. The subsequent Campbell's Soup can works were very diverse. The heights ranged from 20 inches (508 mm) to 6 feet (1.8 m). Generally, the cans were portrayed as if they were freshly produced cans without flaws. Occasionally, he chose to depict cans with torn labelLabel
A label is a piece of paper, polymer, cloth, metal, or other material affixed to a container or article, on which is printed a legend, information concerning the product, addresses, etc. A label may also be printed directly on the container or article....
s, peeling labels, crushed bodies, or opened lids
Lid (container)
A lid, also known as a cap, is part of a container, and serves as the cover or seal, usually one that completely closes the object.-History:...
like those in the images in this section. Sometimes he added related items like a bowl of soup or a can opener, such as the one in the image on the right. Sometimes he produced images of related items without any soup cans such as Campbell's Tomato Juice Box (above right), which are not strictly a part of the series although a part of the theme. Many of these works
Work of art
A work of art, artwork, art piece, or art object is an aesthetic item or artistic creation.The term "a work of art" can apply to:*an example of fine art, such as a painting or sculpture*a fine work of architecture or landscape design...
were produced at his famous studio "The Factory
The Factory
The Factory was Andy Warhol's original New York City studio from 1962 to 1968, although his later studios were known as The Factory as well. The Factory was located on the fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street, in Midtown Manhattan. The rent was "only about one hundred dollars a year"...
."
Irving Blum made the original thirty-two canvases available to the public through an arrangement with the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in Washington, DC by placing them on permanent loan two days before Warhol's death. However, the original Campbell's Soup Cans is now a part of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
permanent collection. A print called Campbell's Soup Cans II
Campbell's Soup Cans II
Campbell's Soup Cans II is a work of art produced in 1969 by Andy Warhol as part of his Campbell's Soup Cans series. 250 sets of this print were made, and edition #17 is in the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago...
is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary art venues...
in Chicago. 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962 (Acrylic on canvas, 72 inches x 100 inches), in the private collection of John and Kimiko Powers is the largest single canvas of the Campbell's Soup can paintings. It is composed of ten rows and twenty columns of numerous flavors of soups. Experts point to it as one of the most significant works of pop art both as a pop representation and as conjunction with immediate predecessors such as Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
and the successors movements of Minimal and Conceptual art. The very similar 100 Cans from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is an art museum located in Delaware Park in Buffalo, New York. The gallery is a major showplace for modern art and contemporary art. It is located directly across the street from Buffalo State College.-History:...
collection is shown above on the left. The earliest soup can painting seems to be Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato Rice), a 1960 ink, tempera, crayon, and oil canvas.
In many of the works, including the original series, Warhol drastically simplified the gold medallion that appears on Campbell's Soup cans by replacing the paired allegorical figures with a flat yellow disk. In most variations, the only hint of three-dimensionality came from the shading on the tin lid. Otherwise the image was flat. The works with torn labels are perceived as metaphors of life in the sense that even packaged food must meet its end. They are often described as expressionistic.
By 1970, Warhol established the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist with a $60,000 sale of Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Torn Label (Vegetable Beef) (1962) in a sale at Parke-Bernet, the preeminent American auction house of the day (later acquired by Sotheby's
Sotheby's
Sotheby's is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation.-History:The oldest auction house in operation is the Stockholms Auktionsverk founded in 1674, the second oldest is Göteborgs Auktionsverk founded in 1681 and third oldest being founded in 1731, all Swedish...
). This record was broken a few months later by his rival for the artworld's attention and approval, Lichtenstein, who sold a depiction of a giant brush stroke, Big Painting No. 6 (1965) for $75,000.
In May 2006, Warhol’s Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) (1962) sold for $11,776,000 and set the current auction
Auction
An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder...
world record
World record
A world record is usually the best global performance ever recorded and verified in a specific skill or sport. The book Guinness World Records collates and publishes notable records of all types, from first and best to worst human achievements, to extremes in the natural world and beyond...
for a painting from the Campbell Soup can series. The painting was purchased for the collection of Eli Broad
Eli Broad
Eli Broad is an American businessman from Detroit, Michigan who resides in Los Angeles, California.-Life and career:An only child, Broad was born in the Bronx to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents. His father was a housepainter, his mother was a dressmaker. His family moved to Detroit when he...
, a man who once set the record for the largest credit card
Credit card
A credit card is a small plastic card issued to users as a system of payment. It allows its holder to buy goods and services based on the holder's promise to pay for these goods and services...
transaction when he purchased Lichtenstein's "I … I'm Sorry" for $2.5 million with an American Express
American Express
American Express Company or AmEx, is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Three World Financial Center, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Founded in 1850, it is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is best...
card. The $11.8 million Warhol sale was part of the Christie's
Christie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
Sales of Impressionist, Modern
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
, Post-War and Contemporary
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
Art for the Spring Season of 2006 that totaled $438,768,924.
The broad variety of work produced using a semi-mechanized process with many collaborators, Warhol's popularity, the value of his works, and the diversity of works across various media and genre have created a need for the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board
Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. is a private corporation which certifies the authenticity of works by artist Andy Warhol. The organization was created in association with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts....
to certify the authenticity
Authenticity in art
Authenticity in art has a variety of meanings related to different ways in which a work of art or an artistic performance may be considered authentic.Denis Dutton distinguishes between nominal authenticity and expressive authenticity....
of works by Warhol.
Conclusion
Mirror image
A mirror image is a reflected duplication of an object that appears identical but reversed. As an optical effect it results from reflection off of substances such as a mirror or water. It is also a concept in geometry and can be used as a conceptualization process for 3-D structures...
and reversing the images. Some in the art world consider Warhol's work completed after his 1968 shooting—which occurred the day before the Bobby Kennedy assassination— to be less significant than that done before it.
Today, the most well remembered Warhol Campbell's Soup can works are from the first phase. Warhol is further regarded for his iconic serial celebrity silkscreens of such people as Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
, Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
, Liz Taylor, and Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
, produced during his 1962–1964 silkscreening phase. In fact, his most commonly repeated painting subjects are Taylor, Monroe, Presley, Jackie Kennedy and similar celebrities. In addition to being a notable fine artist, Warhol was a renowned cinematographer, author, and commercial illustrator. Posthumously, he became the subject of the largest single-artist art museum in the United States. Many Warhol art exhibits include footage of his cinematic directorial efforts (e.g., The Museum of Contemporary Art's ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, Disasters, 1962–1964 that ran from March 18, 2006 – June 18, 2006). Some say his contributions as an artist pale in comparison to his contributions as a film-maker. Others make it clear that he was not the most conventionally skilled artist of his day. Nonetheless, his techniques were emulated by other highly respected artists and his works continue to command high prices.