Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans"

Origin
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 (51 cm) in height × 16 inches (41 cm) 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 screen printing 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.

Motivation
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 1950s—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 cans. 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 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.

Message
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.

Today
This artifact was grabbed about twenty days after Andy had shown it at a gallery. The Warehouse became known of the painting when they heard a report of soup cans matching the paintings were left near by the exhibition. Andy was a little miffed at that and let it go, but the story was odd as no one had broken into the gallery the night before. So when the Agents got to the gallery, they found out that a custodian had touched one of the canvases, and a can popped out. He was first shocked, but when he touched it again another can popped out of a different painting. So he touched a few of them to get some cans, and left the one he didn't like behind. The Agents of course managed to carefully take all thirty-two paintings back to the Warehouse without any problems.

But when Mr. Kipling and Artie were going through the gallery one day, and Mr. Kipling remarked about the painting, Artie explained that they didn't figure out the downside until after they brought the paintings to the Warehouse. Since the Agents had to pull long shifts in the Warehouse categorizing and doing inventory, when they got hungry, they would go over to the paintings and grab a can. But once night, an agent decided to grab a lot of cans, and then the paintings started to just randomly spit out cans, until it just kept on sending out Green Pea soup. Of course after the cans stopped appearing, the agents collected the cans and split them up to eat them, but the agent who started the problem got stuck with the cans of Green Pea soup.