Campbell's Soup Cans
Starting in the 1930s, abstract expressionism severely reduced still life to raw depictions of form and colour, until by the 1950s, total abstraction dominated the art world. However, pop art in the 1960s and 1970s reversed the trend and created a new form of still life. Much pop art (such as Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans") is based on still life, but its true subject is most often the commodified image of the commercial product represented rather than the physical still-life object itself. Roy Lichtenstein's "Still Life with Goldfish Bowl" (1972) combines the pure colours of Matisse with the pop iconography of Warhol. Wayne Thiebaud's "Lunch Table" (1964) portrays not a single family's lunch but an assembly line of standardized American foods.