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SOUP’S ON!

ANDY WARHOL AND THE ART OF CAMPBELL’S SOUP by David W. Brown

the same thing over and over again.”The next day he went to the local grocery store and bought every type of soup they had. When he started working on that first painting, he projected a can onto a 16” x 20” canvas, which he painted with excruci- ating precision not just to match the origi- nal, but to emulate the machine that was responsible for the creation of the original in the first place.They were screen printed as a set — one for every variety of Camp- bell’s then available: 32 in all. The labels are one-dimensional, the reds and whites lacking any shade or shadow.The humani- ty of the pieces can be found in tiny imper- fections and flourishes from one painting to the next. There are slight variations in placement on the canvases. It is obvi- ous right away that the lettering of each soup’s name was painted by hand. They feel awkward in style and spacing.Warhol hand-stamped the ring of fleurs-de-lis on the bottom of each can and, there again, you see tiny differences — which means, when the paintings are on display together, your eyes almost sweep over the set. The artist forces you to look beyond the same- ness of the paintings, and to look closely at the mundane.

Their grand unveiling at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962 was Warhol’s coming out as a fine artist. He had never before had a solo gallery showing. And though the paintings were from the outset conceived as a set and meant to be exhib- ited together — displayed as you might find the cans on a grocery store shelf — the first few were sold off by Irving Blum, the gallery owner, until Blum realized that the power of Campbell’s Soup Cans could only be realized with the paintings in union. So off he went, buying back the art, and he offered to take the entire set off of Warhol’s hands for $1,000, to be paid over 10 months. This was a pretty good deal for Warhol — that’s about $8,000 in today’s money, adjusted for inflation — though after Warhol’s death, they sold for $15 million. Campbell’s Soup Cans today defines the pop art movement, and though Warhol was hardly an unknown before their debut, he became a superstar in the art world. Today the paintings can be found in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (though rarely all at once). The originals, of course, can be found on grocery store shelves.

WHAT TO MAKE OF CAMP- BELL’S SOUP CANS, ANDY WARHOL’S FAMED SERIES OF 32 PAINTINGS THAT HELPED DEFINE THE POP ART MOVE- MENT IN THE EARLY 1960S? At the time, some art critics made almost nothing of them. One gallery famously stocked up on actual soup, boasting that its cans were much cheaper than those of Warhol. But the art world soon became enamored of the works; it was clear that Warhol was speaking to a lot of issues in his deceptively simple pieces. What was art? To whom did it belong? How did mass production affect public percep- tion of art? Indeed, mechanical produc- tions were a threat to the art world itself. Here was Warhol holding up a mirror and pointing it in a lot of different directions. It’s hard to say how much of this was intended. Before starting the series, Warhol didn’t know what to paint. It was a friend who suggested an everyday object “like Campbell’s Soup,” and the idea struck a chord in Warhol. He was an admitted fan of Campbell’s, saying later in an inter- view, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess,

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