Warhol's 32 Campbell's Soup Cans And The Decline Of Connoisseurship | The Huffington Post Warhol's 32 Campbell's Soup Cans And The Decline Of Connoisseurship 07/13/2011 02:29 pm ET | Updated Sep 12, 2011 John Seed Professor of Art and Art History, Mt. San Jacinto College Above: A 2007 visitor to MoMA in New York City takes in Andy Warhol's 1962 set of 20 by 16 inch canvasses depicting 32 varieties of Campbell's soup.

Photo Credit Rian Castillo On June 29th I published a blog titled "Robert Hughes and the Warhol Faultline: Where Do You Stand?" In that blog, I included the following personal observation about Andy Warhol: "I don't think Warhol was stupid -- I think he was a genius as a social observer and marketeer -- but I also think he did genuine damage to the field of art." A week later I learned that MOCA Los Angeles will be exhibiting the complete set of Warhol's 32 Campbell's Soup can paintings through September 7th. I'll use the opportunity -- and the soup cans -- to say about more about just what I think the damage was. Before I get started, I need to offer a disclaimer. What I am about to say comes only from my intuitions, and not from any rigorous or reasonable study of Warhol or his works. I am going to take advantage of the wide latitude available to me as a blogger to let my own biases, personal issues and art world conspiracy theories guide my commentary. I think of Andy Warhol's soup cans as a statement about the decline and increasing irrelevance of connoisseurship.

The word connoisseur comes from the French term conoistre which means roughly "to know" or "to know intimately." The dictionary tells us that a connoisseur is "a person with expert knowledge or training, especially in the fine arts," or "a person of informed and discriminating taste." By bringing a representation of mundane consumer choices into an art context I feel that Warhol was saying "In the future you will be choosing art the same way you shop for groceries." To choose between Golden Mushroom and Scotch Broth doesn't take much effort, and Campbell's is and was an established brand. For Warhol, who became one of the art world's leading brands not long after he exhibited his soup cans, it was becoming clear in his mind that if he could become famous, collectors wouldn't need to make fine distinctions in choosing his works. Warhol, who had absorbed much of what the sociologist and media theorist Marshall McLuhan had to say, was convinced that fame, and its cousin -- the name brand -- would increasingly subvert our decision-making faculties. The soup can series stands for the situation of all consumers in a modern, capitalist, industrial society.

We get to "choose" from groups of factory produced items whose packaging and labeling attempt to convince us that we are indeed choosing items of quality. I must be a bit Marxist in my views of this, as I do believe that the main goal of modern marketing is to give us the illusion of choices to screen out the mundane origins and the lack of variety in the products that dominate our markets and our lives as consumers. Warhol correctly prophesied, and perhaps contributed to, the McDonaldization of aesthetic culture. According to sociologist Georger Ritzer, McDonaldization is characterized by culture moving away from the traditional motivations of morality, custom and emotion and becomes more interested in efficiency and rational thought. It is the kind of culture you get in a society consumed by thinking about money, production, marketing and consumption. Although the soup cans images were not created using photo-silkscreening, as were many of his later works, they were executed in what have been characterized as "semi-mechanical" methods. I call the soup can series "works" because I just can't bear to call them paintings. If anything, they are an open-casket funeral for the traditional of painting.

Just as the factory made object wiped out hand work and decoration in the late 19th century, Warhol's aesthetics did away with the connection between the hand and the sensory imagination. Morality -- which other modernists had also tended by bypass -- was totally gone. The soup cans, seen together, can be seen as a still-life. The tradition of the still life, so full of symbols and moral suggestions comes to a dead end in Warhol. The viewer of a still-life used to be invited to participate by pondering plentitude, gluttony, or vanity. In Warhol, all that is left is for the viewer, if inclined, to reach out, choose a soup and grab the can opener. Choices, in Warhol, are innocent and amoral. Anyone who has taken a course in modern art has heard all the various proclamations about the moment painting "died," but I think Warhol out-did Malevich and all the others who tried to assassinate painting. The way he drained the sensuality and nuance right out of it, replaced it with a mechanical approach and used appropriated subject matter is devastating.

If you think Warhol was great -- and believe me, I know that many, many people do -- I would think that it was his effective attack on painting that you might consider one of his greatest accomplishments. No doubt about it: he changed things. The things about the tradition of painting that I so love are the human elements: touch, the connection between the hand and the mind, discovery, spontaneity, surprise, difference, eccentricity, transcendence, nuance, these are the things that Warhol felt he could do without. They, and a billion other things that there are no words for, are the qualities that Warhol's rubber-stamp approach were meant to expunge. These tangible and intangible qualities also represent much of what connoisseurs, critics, afficianados and experts have traditionally done the work of trying to discern and discuss. If you were to argue that Warhols work does have the qualities above, I would tell you that his work tends to quote or even parody those qualities. In his aesthetic the mechanical and the dispassionate were elevated, while the human and the passionate were extinguished. As a result, the set of faculties that a person uses in appreciating a Warhol is remarkably sparse.

Warhol designed his works for a very, very broad demographic: everyone. Believe me, I am not saying that Warhol didn't leave some things to be written about. Case in point: I am writing about him now. Art dealer Irving Blum, who first showed the soup cans in his Los Angeles gallery has stated that spending time with the works convinced them that they are "complicated" and I agree with that. However, I think the complications are intellectual, sociological and philosophical. Warhol made painfully boring objects, and that is the interesting part, the complicated part. In an insightful article that appeared in the LA Times on July 10th , critic Christopher Knight argues that the genius of Pop Art was that it provided an "acute critique of high culture's supercilious conceits." I like Knight's thinking, and perhaps my real quarrel with Warhol and his soup cans is that we have a profound disagreement over what matters in artistic culture and who it is meant to address. Honestly, I could make the 2 hour drive to LA to see the soup cans at Warhol, but Warhol's works are among the very least interesting works in terms of being seen in person.

They do well in reproduction, which isn't surprising since Warhol's key works tend to be reproductions. If you go to LA, see the Warhol soup cans and find them fascinating, more power to you. I do think that they may have what you could call a "relic" fascination, and by that I mean that they are historic objects and that they can evoke a direct physical connection to an era and a place. Yes, they were made in Andy Warhol's silver factory studio while the beautiful people were around, and you may want to connect with that. By the way, am I the only super-serious one who thinks that by naming his working studio "The Factory" Warhol in fact mocked the situation of workers in real factories? Just how cool was all that hedonism? After you leave MOCA, get on the Pasadena freeway and head up to the Huntington Museum and Gardens, and there you will find a single Warhol soup can: "Small Crushed Campbell's Soup Can (Beef Noodle)" from 1962.

You may find it dull, as I did, but hanging on the opposite wall was Richard Diebenkorn's 1954 "Berkeley #24," on loan from the Norton Simon Museum. Compared to the Warhol it looked refreshingly uncertain in its attempts to balance representation and abstraction. In the age of Wal-Mart, where simply "liking things" seems increasingly sinister, I'm hungry for painting and all of its rich human traces and connections. Maybe we live in a world where "Rembrandt" is a toothpaste, but every educated person should know who Rembrandt was before he was a brand. Warhol is a brand name too, but not one that I will be buying anytime soon. I don't have the cash, or the appetite for what he served up.

Andy Warhol's Campbell’s Soup Can Paintingss--artnet News Blake Gopnik , October 9, 2015 THE DAILY PIC (#1408): To show all 32 of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soups, as the Museum of Modern Art is now doing, is the equivalent of setting out all of Leonardo’s portraits, including the Mona Lisa, or all of Rembrandt’s paintings of himself, or Monet’s complete Haystacks. Art just doesn’t get any better, or more important, than the 32 paintings that MoMA has up. Weirdly, the New York art world hasn’t much cottoned on to the epochal exhibition in its midst; there’s far less buzz about it than there should be. With only nine days left in the show, I decided to toot its horn in today’s expanded Daily Pic. Herewith, in honor of the 32 flavors of Warhol’s cans, are 32 Short Thoughts About Campbell’s Soup (with apologies to scholars who may have had some of these thoughts before me): 1) These 32 canvases are pretty much old-school paintings, without much in common with actual ads.

Like most Pop art, that is, they are distinctly high art that happens to riff on the low. They do not undo the difference; they need it in order to mean anything. 2) MoMA is presenting all 32 “flavors” in one room, in one long line, to mimic the way they were shown in their first exhibition, in July of 1962 at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. (Since then, they’ve usually been hung in a modernist grid.) As at Ferus, all 32 are standing at MoMA on a long shelf about three inches wide, which is almost always billed as evoking supermarket display. But when was the last time you saw a three-inch deep shelf at your local Gristedes? (That was Warhol’s grocer, right across Lexington Avenue from the home where he painted his Soups.) The shelf at Ferus and MoMA is much more like the ones used to display precious prints and paintings, when they’re brought out for consideration at a fine picture gallery – the kind of place Warhol frequented around this time as he built his own collection.

3) Another bromide I don’t buy: That Warhol’s decade in commercial art was what led him to make art about commercial products. As several of his early clients have explained – and as a bit of social history proves – his illustrations were seen as deploying elite styles to sell high-end goods. His commercial work was closer to traditional, conservative artmaking than his Pop art was; it didn’t lead him to Pop. Pop was actually his escape from his commercial past, into something more serious and radical. 4) Warhol may have been a commercial artist, but he almost never made an image that would have been seen with a crowd of its mates, the way you see a pile of identical products on a supermarket shelf. His illustrations would have been seen on a single magazine or newspaper page, one by one; after all, how many people buy more than one copy of such publications? In fact, I think the scruffy, very hand-made look of his illustrations was meant to give the magazine that commissioned them a one-off look, even when a reader knew it was printed in vast numbers. With his lineup of Soups Warhol is going somewhere he hasn’t been before.

5) If Warhol had wanted to truly ape the assembly line, he’d have made 32 paintings that were all of tomato soup. Instead, he gets us noticing the range of soups that are made and the variations among them. The paintings are less about repetition and uniformity than about uniqueness and difference. Is it worth noting that a gay man made them? 6) Spend any serious time looking at these 32 canvases, and you realize that they were laboriously painted by hand, no doubt over many weeks. They are an entirely, and explicitly, artisanal simulation of mass production, not some kind of bastard child of it. That tension between hand and mass production is part of their meaning and charm. 7) Warhol’s 32 paintings are working class, but in an older sense. They are the direct product of labor – not purchased, but made. In the language that was de rigeur in their era, Warhol’s paintings are not examples of alienated Labor filling the demands of Capital (that’s what actual assembly-line soups are about) but rather they stand for the honest labor of an artisan filling his own needs – in this case, for avant-garde art.

8) The actual Tomato Soup painting has several random little splashes of red paint on its background. Was Warhol trying to signal that it had started life in a classic artist’s studio, where all kinds of splashy accidents happen – not in a printing plant where product labels are born? 9) To make his Campbell’s Soups, Warhol projected his source images onto the canvas, drew the edges of what he saw, then brushed-in those outlines with paint. It’s a tremendously laborious, lo-tech, old-fashioned process that had almost nothing to do with mechanical reproduction – with the kind of reproduction that went into real soup-can labels, for instance. Warhol is staging himself as the anti-machine, even while he pretended to love automation. (Even a few years later, the silkscreening in Warhol’s so-called Factory never went beyond cottage labor.) 10) I spent five hours with the soup cans, and could easily and happily have spent more. That’s because their effects and details are so subtle that they demand, and repay, close looking and hard thought. Coming to grips with them is an all-or-nothing proposition: You either take a quick look to get their gestalt or you dig deep into their subtleties.

As with Warhol’s great movie Empire (a single shot of the Empire State Building, which I once watched for its full eight hours), the lack of obvious and special effects in his Campbell’s Soups makes you more attuned to their smallest details. Warhol, supposedly the most newfangled of artists, in fact makes works that compel the most old-fashioned connoisseurial looking. 11) As you study the 32 kinds of soup, you notice all kinds of strange details: Who knew (or remembered) that tomato-rice soup is “old-fashioned” or that cheddar-cheese soup (which is what, thinned-out Cheez Whiz?) got billed by Campbell’s as being “great as sauce, too.” Notice Warhol’s carefully preserved comma in that last phrase; it points to how intensely observational these paintings really are. They are in the best, open-eyed tradition of the Dutch still life. Despite Warhol’s slacker persona as an artist, there’s nothing casual about the looking that went into his Campbell’s pictures. 12) Actual 1950s ads for Campbell’s products are cheery, Norman Rockwell -ish things, they aren’t deadpan presentations of packaging.

That means that Warhol, despite his background illustrating ads, is using his paintings to riff on objects and products, not on the way they are sold to us by commercial artists of the kind he had been. 13) Warhol’s Soups, as painted for the Ferus show, weren’t based on photographs of a Campbell’s can. (There are other Soup paintings that are.) The Ferus pictures are based on a crude little print of a can that the Campbell’s company used on the front of its mailing envelopes. Because of that, while Warhol may be suggesting that he’s rendering a product rather than an ad for it, there’s a strange extra distance between his image and an actual thing. There’s a hall-of-mirrors effect in these Soups, and it begins at their beginning. 14) For Warhol at least, some of these soups may have acted as tiny in-jokes or mementos. “Scotch Broth (A Hearty Soup)” may have recalled his childhood in Carnegie-powered, plaid-mad Pittsburgh (his college was totally Scottish-themed). Memories of his move to New York may have been triggered by “Clam Chowder (Manhattan Style)”.

15) The Campbell’s Soup label was developed in the 1890s, and was showing its age by the time Warhol copied it in his 32 paintings. Those soup cans don’t represent an example of the latest in postwar consumption and marketing, as has been claimed; their label made them all about nostalgia for an earlier era that had a fond and faintly comic feel. That label was of a piece with the Victorian and Edwardian gewgaws that Warhol had been collecting for a decade by then, as part of his foray into camp – which often has a drop of nostalgia to it. 16) The vintage Campbell’s label is also perfectly in keeping with the Pop pictures Warhol had made just before, also riffing on nostalgic designs: A candlestick telephone from the 1920s (his very first apartment had come with one), a Royal typewriter from 1936, dollar bills with their iconic 19th-century look. 17) It’s hard to know if there’s any truth to the story that Warhol used to eat a daily meal of Campbell’s soup.

He’s such a dedicated fibber that him saying it makes it less likely to be true, not more; when others tell the same story they may just be aping his anecdote. But if Warhol’s diet did in fact include a Campbell’s moment, there are hints that it might have begun not long after his father died, when his mother fell sick with cancer and was too ill to cook for her boys. That means that for Warhol, at least, those tin cans weren’t a cheery sign of good times but a reminder of hard ones. 18) Where, in modern culture, do you come across a bunch of oblong images in a row, with just slight variations among them? In a length of exposed movie film. The Campbell’s Soups, from early 1962, either foreshadow the films Warhol starts making about nine months later or they come out of his childhood infatuation with movies. (Although that’s been much overstated.) Think of the 32 frames in the MoMA show as some 1.3 seconds of footage.

(Or two full seconds at the slow-mo speeds Warhol preferred.) 19) You can only get at the full effect and meaning of Warhol’s Campbell Soups by seeing them all together. (I’m not sure I could have voiced 32 different thoughts on a single one.) Luckily, Warhol’s L.A. dealer, Irving Blum, realized just this, and bought the whole lot for $1,000 dollars. (He bargained Warhol down). He sold them three decades later to MoMA for $15-million. If you found the right Qatari royal to buy them now, they might be worth 30 times that. 20) Out of the mouths of babes … comes a good art review. In a rare moment of blankness in front of the Soups, I heard a little boy, about eight years old, reading off the labels on all 32 cans. I suddenly realized that, on top of being visual objects, these works are also phonetic and poetic. They lie somewhere on the spectrum between text-based art, concrete verse and radical music.

Warhol knew all three: An early boyfriend (of sorts) was in the poetry crowd at the avant-garde Black Mountain College; Warhol’s favorite LP of 1949, when he’d just arrived in New York, was a MoMA recording of Edith Sitwell reciting the near-nonsense verse of her “Façade”, to tough music by William Walton; the woman Warhol was rooming with at the time had founded the nation’s first all-percussion ensemble – both she and Warhol were great fans of John Cage . 21) As is very hard to see in reproduction, the 32 paintings’ backgrounds are a mid-gray, not white. That means that they have still less in common with the printed soup ads that they are said to riff on, where the white of the paper is most often used as background. In the paintings, it feels more like the gray metal of the soup cans has seeped out across the whole canvas. 22) Nope, that’s not right – as is almost impossible to see, even when you’re right in front of the canvases.

If you get them at just the right angle, however, you can see that Warhol added a thin layer of actual metallic paint to his cans, so they stand out just a tiny touch from their backgrounds. Metallic paint was a trademark of Jackson Pollock ’s spilled abstractions, so you wonder if there’s an echo of that in Warhol’s choice. (Like Picasso, Pollock represented a Freudian father whom Oedipus-Warhol always needed to kill. And here I should cite the claims of my colleague-in-criticism Christopher Knight, who argues that, in 1962, “soup” was a word used for the paint of the Abstract Expressionists.) 23) A question, really, not a resolved thought: Why does Warhol not include any detail on the surface of the “medal” in the middle of his Campbell’s Soup labels? (The detail seems to have been there in his source.) Is it simply because other paints don’t stick well on top of gold? Because getting the medals just right would take too much work and might never look good, anyway? Did Warhol want the medal to evoke plain gold coins, as a kind of marker for the capitalist system?

Did he just like the gold circle’s graphic punch? 24) Took me a while to notice, but Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soups … match Bach’s 32 Goldberg Variations. I’m not saying that Bach’s number governed Warhol’s choice; I’m just mooting the possibility that he and his viewers might have noticed the rhyme. Warhol was not the low-culture guy he’s been painted, not by a long shot; that was a pose. At least early-on, he loved serious drama and literature as well as classical music. Opera was his favorite – once he could afford it, he subscribed to the Met – but we know that he went to instrumental concerts as well. And let’s not forget that Glenn Gould had made a giant splash, just seven years before Warhol’s Soups, with his landmark record of the Goldbergs. One source claims that Warhol used to blast Bach on his stereo, and Edie Sedgwick herself once planned a dance to Bach’s music played as rock. 25) The format and size of Warhol’s soup paintings doesn’t have much to do with product advertising, as far as I can see.

It comes much closer to the scale and shape of certain traditional portraits. So think of the Campbell’s Soups in terms of some display of ancestral faces, or as echoing the hundreds of self-portraits in the Uffizi’s Vasari Corridor. 26) Let’s just note, for the record, that a childhood neighbor of Warhol’s said that their street was far too poor for canned goods; you made your own soup out of the cabbage and scraps you could get, or from the “pet” chicken that we know Warhol’s mother once slaughtered for soup. “Canning”, on that street, meant putting up your garden’s tomatoes. (And this neighbor was considered better off than the Warhola clan.) Her description bills Warhol, the Campbell’s Soup painter, once again as an outsider looking in on what other Americans might take for granted. 27) The hand-made vibe and sheer eccentricity of the Soup paintings actually make them close cousins to real outsider art – in their own day, especially, there was no other category they fit better in. Outsiders often make art out of and about the things around them; they often have the limited skills (in hand-lettering, for instance) that Warhol displays.

28) And let’s not forget that the Pittsburgh of Warhol’s childhood was where outsider art first made its big splash, with the inclusion of John Kane’s work into the 1927 Carnegie International. There were outsiders in the museum shows of Warhol’s college years, and when he got out of art school, there was a big dose of outsiderism in the style he chose for his commercial work. If not literally “cooking-up” his soup paintings at the kitchen table, Warhol, outsider-like, was making them nearby in his home – he didn’t have the studio of a professional artist until late in 1962. 29) Back to that hand lettering for a minute. Warhol’s labels are not, in fact, fluently hand-lettered, the way a skilled sign-painter would do it. There are no manual chops on display. Instead, the letters in Warhol’s paintings are very cleared traced – and not very well ­­– from someone else’s work. His paintings read as being more like just-good-enough records of things in the world – almost like detailed inventories of features – than like actual works of pictorial craft.

30) Why do we always talk about Warhol’s tomato-soup paintings, when there are 31 other flavors to choose from? It’s true that Campbell’s began its soup-making with tomato, and somehow that’s a fact that we’ve all taken in. This proves that Warhol was right to imagine that Campbell’s Soup has a special place in our cultural knowledge-base. 31) There’s no visible order to Warhol’s Campbell’s Soups, and no particular order in how they should be hung. But they seem terribly systematic, as though governed by some unknown algorithm. They have the feel of conceptual works that came later by artists such as Mel Bochner or Hanne Darboven. Although the Campbell’s Soups are always presented as prime examples of a vintage, 1960s Pop-y style, I feel they sit equally well in later moments – including our own. 32) When they were first shown, the idea that these paintings might invite any kind of close or connoisseurial looking was mostly seen as absurd. They didn’t seem to have any noteworthy features, let alone esthetic or visual ones.

They were seen as, at best, a deliberate, absurdist, Dada one-liner – a “put-on” was the term used at the time, or a joke. Just goes to show that, pace the basic premise of most art history, original, period readings can be less revealing and relevant than later ones. (Artworks ©2015 Andy Warhol Foundation / ARS, NY / TM Licensed by Campbell’s Soup Co. All rights reserved.) For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive . Follow artnet News on Facebook. Share The fascinating story behind Andy Warhol's soup cans | Art | Agenda | Phaidon The fascinating story behind Andy Warhol's soup cans The fascinating story behind Andy Warhol's soup cans On the show's opening night a rival dealer offered soup cans cheaper in his gallery, Warhol's own gallerist bought back the five he'd sold, including one from Dennis Hopper, then offered to buy entire set from Andy for just $3,000 32 Campbell's Soup Cans 1962 - Andy Warhol SHARE THIS PAGE Father figure, drag queen or distillation of Nazi iconography?

New Phaidon Focus book reveals the theories behind Francis Bacon's obsessive reworking of the papal theme in his most famous Velasquez-inspired paintings Article Tools A · A To celebrate the day of Andy Warhol's birth (he was born this day in 1928) we thought it would be an opportune moment to look back at the story behind one of his most iconic works, 32 Campbell's Soup Cans from 1962. There's a fascinating story about the work in our Phaidon Focus iBook for Mac and iPad and it's also featured in our peerless Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné . Reflecting on his career, Warhol claimed that the Campbell’s Soup Can was his favourite work and that, "I should have just done the Campbell’s Soups and kept on doing them ... because everybody only does one painting anyway." Certainly, it is the signature image of the artist’s career and a key transitional work from his hand-painted to photo-transferred paintings. Created during the year that Pop Art emerged as the major new artistic movement, two of his soup can paintings were included in the landmark Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition, ‘The New Realists’.

A spread from the Focus book In the spring of 1962, Warhol had been working on his new renditions of ads and comic strips when he saw Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery. Soliciting suggestions for subjects to paint, he asked a friend, who suggested he choose something that everybody recognised like Campbell’s Soup. In a flash of inspiration he bought cans from the store and began to trace projections onto canvas, tightly painting within the outlines to resemble the appearance of the original offset lithograph labels. Instead of the dripping paint in his previous ads and comics, here Warhol sought the precision of mechanical reproduction. At this time he received a return studio visit from Irving Blum of Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, who was expecting to see comic-strip paintings and was surprised by the new soup cans, immediately offering the artist a show that summer. Expanding his subject, he decided to paint one of each of the thirty-two varieties of Campbell’s soups. Blum exhibited the cans on shelves running the length of his gallery. The exhibition caused a mild sensation in Los Angeles. The more daring members of the youthful art and film community were intrigued by their novelty.

Most people, however, treated them with indifference or outright disdain. A nearby art dealer parodied the show by displaying a stack of soup cans, advertising that you could get them cheaper in his gallery. Blum had sold five of the paintings before he recognised that the group functioned best as a single work of art. He bought back the works already purchased, including one from Dennis Hopper, then offered to buy the set from Warhol in instalments for the modest sum of $3,000. Andy Warhol With his Campbell’s Soup Cans installation at Ferus Gallery, the artist realised the possibility of creating works in series, and the visual effect of serial imagery. He continued making variations on his Soup Cans, stencilling multiple cans within a single canvas and so amplifying the effect of products stacked in a grocery store, an idea that he would later develop in the box sculptures. He also realised that the serial repetition of an image drained it of its meaning, an interesting phenomenon most poignantly presented in his Disasters, in which the constant exposure to their graphic displays of violence numbs the senses.

And, perhaps the most significant outcome of this series was the artist’s push towards printing to achieve the mechanical appearance that he sought in his paintings. MoMA | Andy Warhol. Campbell's Soup Cans. 1962 See this work in MoMA’s Online Collection When Warhol first exhibited these Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962, they were displayed together on shelves, like products in a grocery aisle. At the time, the Campbell’s Soup Company sold 32 soup varieties; each canvas corresponds to a different flavor. Warhol did not indicate how the canvases should be installed. At MoMA, they are arranged in rows that reflect the chronological order in which the soups were introduced. The first flavor introduced by the company was tomato, in 1897. Though Campbell’s Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which Warhol was inspired, it is hand- painted , while the fleur de lys pattern ringing each can’s bottom edge is hand-stamped. In this work, he mimicked the repetition and uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety.

Warhol said of Campbell’s Soup, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” Towards the end of 1962, shortly after he completed Campbell’s Soup Cans, Warhol turned to the photo- silkscreen process. A printmaking technique originally invented for commercial use, it would become his signature medium and link his art making methods more closely to those of advertisements. A representation of a person or thing in a work of art. Soup, Posters and Prints at Art.com Soup (360 Items) SWITCH TO VISUAL MODE What's this?You are browsing art in Classic Mode. To try our new experience where you can expore categories visually and discover art using advanced color searching, switch to Visual Mode.

{ImageUrl:' Warhol',ArtistId:29184,Title:'Campbells Soup I: Beef c1968',PODConfigID:0,APNum:3409066,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:43,Source:'GalleryPage'} Campbell's Soup I: Vegetable c1968 {ImageUrl:' Warhol',ArtistId:29184,Title:'Campbells Soup I: Vegetable c1968',PODConfigID:0,APNum:6261444,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:43,Source:'GalleryPage'} Campbell's Soup Can 1965 (Green and Purple) {ImageUrl:' Warhol',ArtistId:29184,Title:'Campbells Soup Can 1965 (Green and Purple)',PODConfigID:0,APNum:7181825,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:43,Source:'GalleryPage'} Campbell's Soup I: Onion c1968 Starting from $74.99 From $74.99 $5

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 $14.99 Add to Cart Frame It {ImageUrl:' Warhol',ArtistId:29184,Title:'Campbells Soup I: Black Bean 1968',PODConfigID:0,APNum:14418208,AvailableInOtherSizes:'true',ItemDisplayTypeID:5,Source:'GalleryPage'} Ship TimeShip time indicates the typical number of business days it takes for your item(s) to leave our facilities but does not include transit time from our facilities to the final destination.Orders that contain multiple items with different ship times will be shipped out based on the item with the longest ship time.Please note: Ship time is determined based on the method of payment chosen.This item cannot be framed Add to Cart Works by independent artists on Tomato Soup Andy Warhol Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Like The Art Story on Facebook Follow The Art Story on Google+ "How can you say one style is better than another?

You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene." Synopsis Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his screen-printed images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and sensational newspaper stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop art. He emerged from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, to become a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York, and to ultimately find a place in the circles of High Society. For many his ascent echoes one of Pop art's ambitions, to bring popular styles and subjects into the exclusive salons of high art. His elevation to the status of a popular icon represented a new kind of fame and celebrity for a fine artist. Key Ideas Warhol's early work in commercial illustration was all about elevating an ordinary product into a more glamorous light for the purpose of selling it as an object of desire to the masses.

His drawings of women’s shoes were decorative and whimsical examples of this where a high heel might be festooned with flowers and birds, lending it an ephemeral female connotation. This early experience in manipulating popular taste would come to inform his original Pop works, which placed everyday objects on a pedestal in their stark and unadorned simplicity. Unlike the commercial work, designed to seduce, this new art would produce the opposite effect by lending a more dispassionate and impersonal mood. Much debate still surrounds the iconic screen-printed images with which Warhol established his reputation as a Pop artist in the early 1960s. Some view his Death and Disaster series, along with his Marilyn pictures, as frank expressions of our universal sorrow surrounding public events. Others view them as some of the first expressions of 'compassion fatigue' – reflecting the way we lose the ability to sympathize with events from which we feel removed. Still others think of these pictures as screens, which buffer us from horrifying circumstances while we personally register and process shock. Although artists had been influenced by popular culture throughout the twentieth century, Pop art marked an important new stage in the breakdown between fine art, celebrity culture, and commercial art forms.

Although Warhol's paintings from the early 1960s were important in pioneering these developments, he would soon take Pop off the canvas and become a leading example of blurring the lines between physical life and art. His lifestyle as an artist and eccentric personality was elevated to star status, his very existence in the social whir of New York City as iconic as the notables whose faces would appear on his eponymous silkscreens. As ringmaster of his silver walled studio coined The Factory, he would create art, film, and host parties populated by a roving cast of larger than life characters where life imitated art and art imitated life. It is arguable that these diverse activities were just as influential in expanding the implications of Pop art. Although Warhol would continue to create paintings intermittently throughout his career, in 1965 he "retired" from the medium to concentrate on making experimental films. The films furthered Warhol’s obsessions with the mundane, oftentimes taking a subject such as Sleep or Eat and painstakingly presenting it in real time, reflecting our droll-like obsessions with ourselves.

Despite years of neglect, these films have recently attracted widespread interest, and Warhol is now seen as one of the most important filmmakers of the period, a forefather of independent film. Critics have traditionally seen Warhol's career as going into decline after a deranged fan shot him in the side of his stomach. Valuing his early paintings above all, they have ignored the activities that absorbed his attention in later years - films, parties, collecting, publishing, and painting commissioned portraits. Yet some have begun to think that all these ventures make up Warhol's most important legacy because they prefigure the diverse interests, activities, and interventions that occupy artists today. In fact, Warhol’s posthumously published diaries remain one of the most decisive time capsule in evidence, documenting his role in that legacy. Our Sponsor: Musart Boutique. Article Continues Below Andy Warhol in your home - own a piece of the museum Most Important Art Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) By the 1960s, the New York art world was in a rut as Abstract Expressionism’s explosion of the 1940s and '50s had grown stale.

Warhol was one of the artists hungry to reintroduce imagery to his work. The gallery owner and interior designer Muriel Latow presented Warhol with the idea of painting soup cans, when she suggested to him that he should paint objects that people use every day. (It is rumoured that Warhol ate the soup for lunch on a daily basis). Because Warhol was already an extremely successful consumer ad designer, he used the techniques of his trade to create an image that was both easily recognizable and visually stimulating. He was well versed in the concepts of the advertising industry, which was currently invading the American psyche with its promise of happiness through abundant consumerism. He mirrored this by painting soup cans on thirty-two canvases aligned on a wall to denote the experience of being in a well-lit supermarket. With this installation, Warhol became credited with envisioning a new type of art that glorified (and also criticized) the nation’s impetus toward consumption.

Warhol would go on to say about his ethos of putting ordinary items front and center, "I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about." Synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases - The Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York Like The Art Story on Facebook Biography Childhood Andy was the third child born to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents, Ondrej and Ulja (Julia) Warhola, in a working class neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He had two older brothers, John and Paul. As a child, Andy was smart and creative. His mother, a casual artist herself, encouraged his artistic urges by giving him his first camera at nine years old. Warhol was known to suffer from a nervous disorder that would frequently keep him at home, and, during these long periods, he would listen to the radio and collect pictures of movie stars around his bed. It was this exposure to current events at a young age that he later said shaped his obsession with pop culture and celebrities. When he was 14, his father passed away, leaving the family money to be specifically used towards higher learning for one of the boys.

It was decided by the family that Andy would benefit the most from a college education. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Early Training After graduating from high school at the age of 16, in 1945, Warhol attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he received formal training in pictorial design. Shortly after graduating, in 1949, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a commercial illustrator. His first project was for Glamour magazine for an article entitled, "Success is a Job in New York." Throughout the 1950s Warhol continued his successful career in commercial illustration, working for several well-known magazines, such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker. He also produced advertising and window displays for local New York retailers. His work with I.

Miller & Sons, for which his whimsical blotted line advertisements were particularly noticed, gained him some local notoriety, even winning several awards from the Art Director's Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In the early 1950s, Andy shortened his name from Warhola to Warhol, and decided to strike out on his own as a serious artist. His experience and expertise in commercial art, combined with his immersion in American popular culture, influenced his most notable work. In 1952, he exhibited Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote in his first individual show at the Hugo Gallery in New York. While exhibiting work in several venues around New York City, he most notably exhibited at MoMA, where he participated in his first group show in 1956. Warhol took notice of new emerging artists, greatly admiring the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, which inspired him to expand his own artistic experimentation. In 1960, Warhol began using advertisements and comic strips in his paintings.

These works, examples of early Pop art, were characterized by more expressive and painterly styles that included clearly recognizable brushstrokes, and were loosely influenced by Abstract Expressionism. However, subsequent works, such his Brillo Boxes (1964), would mark a direct rebellion against Abstract Expressionism, by almost completely removing any evidence of the artist's hand. Mature Period Andy Warhol worked across many media as a painter, printmaker, illustrator, filmmaker and writer. In September 1960, after moving to a townhouse at 1342 Lexington Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he began his most prolific period. From having no dedicated studio space in his previous apartment, where he lived with his mother, he now had plenty of room to work. In 1962 he offered the Department of Real Estate $150 a month to rent a nearby obsolete fire house on East 87th Street. He was granted permission and used this space in conjunction with his Lexington Avenue space until 1964. Continuing with the theme of advertisements and comic strips, his paintings throughout the early part of the 1960s were based primarily on illustrated images from printed media and graphic design.

To create his large-scale graphic canvases, Warhol used an opaque projector to enlarge the images onto a large canvas on the wall. Then, working freehand, he would trace the image with paint directly onto the canvas without a pencil tracing underneath. As a result, Warhol's works from early 1961 are generally more painterly. Late in 1961, Warhol started on his Campbell's Soup Can paintings. The series employed many different techniques, but most were created by projecting source images on to canvas, tracing them with a pencil, and then applying paint. In this way Warhol removed most signs of the artist's hand. In 1962 Warhol started to explore silkscreening. This stencil process involved transferring an image on to a porous screen, then applying paint or ink with a rubber squeegee. This marked another means of painting while removing traces of his hand; like the stencil processes he had used to create the Campbell's Soup Can pictures, this also enabled him to repeat the motif multiple times across the same image, producing a serial image suggestive of mass production. Often, he would first set down a layer of colors which would compliment the stencilled image after it was applied.

His first silkscreened paintings were based on the front and back faces of dollar bills, and he went on to create several series of images of various consumer goods and commercial items using this method. He depicted shipping and handling labels, Coca-Cola bottles, coffee can labels, Brillo Soap box labels, matchbook covers, and cars. From autumn 1962 he also started to produce photo-silkscreen works, which involved transferring a photographic image on the porous silkscreens. His first was Baseball (1962), and those that followed often employed banal or shocking imagery derived from tabloid newspaper photographs of car crashes and civil rights riots, money and consumer household products. In 1964 Warhol moved to 231 East 47th Street, calling it "The Factory." Having achieved moderate success as an artist by this point, he was able to employ several assistants to help him execute his work. This marked a turning point in his career.

Now, with the help of his assistants, he could more decisively remove his hand from the canvas and create repetitive, mass-produced images that would appear empty of meaning and beg the question, "What makes art, art?" This was an idea first introduced by Marcel Duchamp, whom Warhol admired. Warhol had a lifelong fascination with Hollywood, demonstrated by his series of iconic images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. He also expanded his medium into installations, most notably at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964, replicating Brillo boxes in their actual size and then screenprinting their label designs onto blocks made of plywood. Wanting to continue his exploration of different mediums, Warhol began experimenting with film in 1963. Two years later, after a trip to Paris for an exhibition of his work, he announced that he would be retiring from painting to focus exclusively on film. Although he never completely followed through with this intention, he did produce many films, most starring those whom he called the Warholstars, an eccentric and eclectic group of friends who frequented the Factory and were known for their unconventional lifestyle.

He created approximately 600 films between 1963 and 1976, films ranging in length from a few minutes to 24 hours. He also developed a project called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, or EPI, in 1967. The EPI was a multi-media production combining The Velvet Underground rock band with projections of film, light and dance, culminating in a sensory experience of performance art. Warhol had also been self-publishing artist's books since the 1950s, but his first mass produced book, Andy Warhol's Index, was published in 1967. He later published several other books, and founded Interview Magazine with his friend Gerard Malanga in 1969. The magazine is dedicated to celebrities and is still in production today. After an attempt on his life in 1968, by acquaintance and radical feminist, Valerie Solanas, he decided to distance himself from his unconventional entourage. This marked the end of the 1960s Factory scene.

Warhol subsequently sought out companionship in New York high society, and throughout most of the 1970s his work consisted of commissioned portraits derived from printed Polaroid photographs. The most notable exception to this is his famous Mao series, which was done as a comment on President Richard Nixon's visit to China. Lacking the glamour and commercial appeal of his earlier portraits, critics saw Warhol as prostituting his artistic talent, and viewed this later period as one of decline. However, Warhol saw financial success as an important goal. He had made the shift from commercial artist to business artist. Late Years and Death Ironically, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Warhol made a return to painting, and produced works that frequently verged on abstraction. His Oxidation Painting series, which were made by urinating on a canvas of copper paint, echoed the immediacy of the Abstract Expressionists and the rawness of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. By the 1980s, Warhol had regained much of his critical notoriety, due in part to his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente, two much younger and more cutting-edge artists.

In the final years of Warhol's life, he turned to religious subjects; his version of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper is particularly renowned. In these works, Warhol melded the sacred and the irreverent by juxtaposing enlarged logos of brands against images of Christ and his Apostles. After suffering postoperative complications from a routine gall bladder procedure, Warhol died on February 22, 1987. He was buried in his hometown of Pittsburgh. His memorial service was held in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and attended by more than 2,000 people. Legacy Andy Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century, creating some of the most recognizable images ever produced. Challenging the idealist visions and personal emotions conveyed by abstraction, Warhol embraced popular culture and commercial processes to produce work that appealed to the general public. He was one of the founding fathers of the Pop art movement, expanding the ideas of Duchamp by challenging the very definition of art. His artistic risks and constant experimentation with subjects and media made him a pioneer in almost all forms of visual art.

His unconventional sense of style and his celebrity entourage helped him reach the mega-star status to which he aspired. Warhol's will dictated that his estate fund the Warhol Foundation for the advancement of the visual arts, which was subsequently created later that year. Through the joint efforts of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Dia Center for the Arts, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., the Warhol Museum was opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1994, housing a large collection of his work. Influences and Connections Andy Warhol: Skateboards 32 Campbell's Soup Cans | Modern / Contemporary Artist Products | MoMA Design Store Best Seller Andy Warhol: Skateboards 32 Campbell's Soup Cans This hand-numbered limited edition of 100 sets of 32 skate decks is presented in a special packaging that features imagery from Tomato Soup Can. Andy Warhol: Skateboards 32 Campbell's Soup Cans The Skateroom and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts The Skateroom and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 2015 This product is represented in MoMA's Design collection.

This product is in a MoMA Exhibition. Quantity Additional shipping charge of $700 per set.Please allow 3-4 weeks for delivery. * This item cannot be shipped outside of the contiguous U.S. Product Description Andy Warhol: Skateboards 32 Campbell's Soup Cans Andy Warhol's 32 Campbell's Soup Cans are among the most recognizable and celebrated works in the history of modern art. When Warhol painted the well-known red and white cans, he referred to a product list supplied by the Campbell Soup Company, checking off each type of soup as it was completed. When first exhibited in 1962, the 32 canvases of Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans were displayed together on shelves, as if in a grocery aisle. The series is now in MoMA's collection. Here, each can is the centerpiece of its own striking skate deck in a playful marriage of pop-cultural references. This hand-numbered limited edition of 100 sets of 32 skate decks is presented in a special packaging that features imagery from Tomato Soup Can. Hanging wall mounts included.

The skateboards are made in collaboration with The Skateroom, a platform for promoting, selling and producing art on skateboards that supports youth-empowerment and development. Proceeds from this project will benefit Skateistan, an award-winning, international NGO with projects in Afghanistan, Cambodia and South Africa. Skateistan is the first international development initiative to combine skateboarding with educational outcomes. ©/®/™ The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. This item ships from Belgium with a delivery time of three weeks. All sales are final. This item is non-returnable and non-refundable. International customers, please contact Customer Services at +1 (212) 708-9888 for shipping fees and delivery dates. November 2012: Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962 | Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective Current Events in Historical Perspective Printer Friendly Version By Brenna Miller In the 50 years since they first went on display, Andy Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans have become a canonical symbol of American Pop Art.

Warhol, an American commercial illustrator from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania turned fine artist, author, publisher, painter, and film director, first showed the work on July 9, 1962 in the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, California. It was his first solo exhibition. The show was largely uneventful. Few people attended (not even Warhol), and afterwards a secondary showing planned for New York later that year was canceled. Today though, Warhol has his own museum in Pittsburgh and his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans is one of the prized pieces at the New York Museum of Modern Art. An earlier, single canvas version (Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) sold through Christie’s Auction house in 2010 for over $9 million. 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans consists of thirty-two 20”×16” screen-printed canvases, one for each of the varieties sold at the time. They were originally presented linearly, resting on a shelf mounted on the wall in an effort to mimic the grocery store shopping experience. For viewers today, the series tends to evoke nostalgia.

Each print has slight variation due to the inconsistency of the silk-screening process and manual finishing details, and together, they appear “touchingly handmade.” In a world saturated with high-tech media marketing and airbrushed ads, it can be hard to imagine that in the 1960s, Warhol’s now ubiquitous art was criticized as sterile, cold, and mechanical. At the time, Abstract Expressionism, featuring artists such as William de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and privileging human emotion, painterly styles, and “fine art” aesthetics, was the movement to watch. Pop Art by contrast embraced mundane commercialism. Contemporary interpretations of Pop Art ranged from a subversive critique of American consumerism and a warning about the shrinking gap between human and machine, to a legitimation of the joy products bring to our lives. Warhol himself once described Pop Art as “liking things.” When asked why he painted soup cans, he replied, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years … the same thing over and over again.” Like the commodities he drew inspiration from, Warhol fashioned himself as a commercial product.

He worked out of a studio he called the “Factory,” employed an “assembly-line” technique, and his very persona seemed designed as a product for public consumption: plastic, image driven, devoid of a “narrative sense.” Thus, Warhol’s “true” personality, like his art, is hard to grasp. While divesting himself of individuality, he was also a master self-promoter, and, though billed as a prankster, he never gave up the act. Even his autobiographical 1975 “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” is “a parody of personal revelation,” full of hollow banality, constantly reasserting the author’s own “nothingness.” Nevertheless, Warhol’s presence in art and popular culture has been huge. Works like Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962, above) and Brillo Boxes (1964) pushed the public to think about material consumption, while his reproductions of news articles depicting horrific car accidents and portraits of tragic celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and Elvis Presley made us think about our relationship to news and entertainment, and what that relationship said about us as a society.

But however one might ultimately interpret Warhol, his work, or Pop Art in general, by the 1960s industrial production and commercialism were integral to the American way of life. And if art is a reflection of life, Pop Art filled a necessary gap, engaging the consumerist aspect that had increasingly come to characterize US culture. - All images via Wikimedia Commons Andy Warhol - 1791 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy Andy Warhol Overview Works CV Articles Biography Shows Auction Results Related Artists Biography Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical (re)production, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the most iconic images of the 20th century. As famous for his quips as for his art—he variously mused that “art is what you can get away with” and “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”—Warhol drew widely from popular culture and everyday subject matter, creating works like his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), Brillo pad box sculptures , and portraits of Marilyn Monroe, using the medium of silk-screen printmaking to achieve his characteristic hard edges and flat areas of color.

Known for his cultivation of celebrity, Factory studio (a radical social and creative melting pot), and avant-garde films like Chelsea Girls (1966), Warhol was also a mentor to artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat . His Pop sensibility is now standard practice, taken up by major contemporary artists Richard Prince , Takashi Murakami , and Jeff Koons , among countless others. American, 1928–1987, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, based in New York, New York

Question: Which artist’s works include 32 Campbell’s soup cans?
Answer: (Andy) Warhol