Campbell's Soup Cans
Andy Warhol (1928 to 1987) · 1962
Thirty two small canvases hang in a grid, each one showing a single can of Campbell's soup. Tomato, Chicken Noodle, Cream of Mushroom, Pepper Pot, Beef, Clam Chowder: one canvas for every variety the company sold in 1962. From a distance they look identical, red and white labels with a gold medallion, and that sameness is the first shock. Warhol has taken the most ordinary object on an American shelf and asked you to look at it as seriously as at a portrait or a landscape.
Come closer and the sameness breaks down. The cans are painted by hand, not printed, using a projector to trace the outline and a hand cut stencil for the lettering. Only the little fleur de lis border at the bottom was applied with a rubber stamp. Each label carries a different flavour, and small irregularities in the brushwork and the placement of the words show that a person, not a machine, made every one. Warhol had not yet begun silkscreening; this was the last moment of his hand made Pop art.
The paintings were first shown in July 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, lined up on a narrow shelf around the room like groceries, and they made Warhol famous almost overnight. A dealer nearby mocked the show by stacking real cans in his window. The gallery's owner, Irving Blum, bought back the few that had sold to keep the set together, and MoMA acquired the complete series in 1996. Warhol said he painted soup because he had eaten it for lunch every day for twenty years.
Did You Know? The gallery owner Irving Blum bought the whole set for a thousand dollars in 1962 and kept it intact for over thirty years before it came to MoMA.
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