On July 9, 1962, a little-known artist by the name of Andy Warhol opened a small exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. His subject that scratches your head: Campbell’s Soup. Each of his 32 paintings portrayed a different flavor in the range, from tomato to pot of pepper and cream of celery.
For Warhol, not quite 34, this was his first solo painting exhibition. By that time, he had spent nearly a decade as a leading commercial artist, working with high-end advertising clients such as Tiffany & Co. and Dior. But he was determined to become a “real” artist, recognized as much by museums as by critics. His secret weapon? The “Pop” art style emerges.
What do the soup paintings mean?
Artist Andy Warhol with one of his most recent Campbell themed
Mario De Biasi / Mondadori / Getty Images
Pop has revolutionized traditional art. Instead of portraits, landscapes, battle scenes, or other subjects that experts considered “art,” artists like Warhol took images from advertisements, comics and other elements of art. popular culture – the “pop” of pop art. They used humor and irony to comment on how mass production and consumerism have come to dominate so much of American life and culture. Abstract artists of the 1950s like Jackson Pollock may have glorified themselves as creative and individualistic geniuses, but pop artists of the 1960s took the opposite approach. They have tried to smooth out or remove all traces of their own artistic creation process – like brush strokes – so that their work feels almost mechanical, like the mass-produced subject it portrays.
Almost. To make the “Campbell’s Soup Can” paintings, Warhol projected the image of a can of soup onto his blank canvas, traced the outline and details, then carefully filled in with brushes and paint. old-fashioned painting. For consistency, he used a hand stamp to create the fleur-de-lis pattern around the bottom edge of each label, but he didn’t always do it right. Small details – tiny splashes of red on the table in the tomato soup, the fleur-de-lis stamp unevenly applied to others – betrayed the handcrafted origins of the tables. Using fine art techniques to represent an everyday artifact, Warhol captured an essential contradiction in pop art. Although they were supposed to look like they were made mechanically, each paint was slightly different – and not just in the flavor on the label.
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But there is one thing that all 32 tables have in common. Instead of detailing the intricate medallion in the center of each box’s label – representing the “gold medal of excellence” Campbell’s Soup won at the 1900 Paris Exposition – Warhol substituted a gold circle United. “Is it just because other paints don’t stick well to gold?” Because getting the medals correctly would take too much work and might never look good, anyway? muses Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik. “Did he like the graphic hallmark of the golden circle?”
Graphic punch – and an air of nostalgia – may be two reasons Warhol chose the Campbell line of products as his Pop icon. The classic label design had changed little from its beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, including the intimate, cursive “Campbell’s” script, which a company archivist said was very similar to the signature of founder Joseph Campbell. And Warhol himself had grown up on Campbell’s soup. “I drank it,” he says. “I used to have the same lunch every day for 20 years.”
How were the soup paintings first received?
Alberto Pizzoli / AFP / Getty Images
When Warhol’s show opened in 1962, Pop was just getting started. People had no idea what to make with art so different from anything art was supposed to be.
On the one hand, Irving Blum, one of the owners of Ferus Gallery, chose to display the paintings on narrow shelves running the length of the gallery, much like a supermarket aisle. “The cans are on shelves,” he later said of his installation. “Why not?”
The show did not make the sensation Blum and Warhol hoped. In fact, the lack of response from the public or art critics could be severe. “This young ‘artist’ is either a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan,” wrote one reviewer. A cartoon in the Los Angeles Times ridiculed the paintings and their supposed viewers. “Frankly, the cream of asparagus doesn’t do anything for me,” one art lover said to another, standing in the gallery. “But the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodles gives me a real Zen feeling.” An art dealer down the street from Ferus Gallery was even more biting. He had real cans of Campbell’s soup in his window, with a sign that said, “Don’t be fooled. Get the original. Our low price – two for 33 cents. “
Even so, Blum managed to sell five paintings, mostly to friends, including actor Dennis Hopper. But before the show even ended, he made a sudden about-face. Realizing that the paintings worked best as a complete set, Blum bought back the ones he had sold. He agreed to pay Warhol $ 1,000 for the 32 paintings, paid over 10 months. Warhol was thrilled – he had always thought of “Campbell’s Soup Cans” as a set. For the artist and the dealer, the decision was a “cunning” move that would pay off much later.
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Why have the paintings become such a sensation?
Left: Campbell’s “Souper” dress, a paper fashion inspired by Andy Warhol’s Pop Soup Can paintings.
Louisa Gouliamaki / AFP via Getty Images
Once audiences and critics got over their shock, they warmed to Warhol’s soup. On the one hand, they made art fun. How difficult could it be to understand a painting when the original was probably on your kitchen shelf? Critics began to see the sly and ironic humor in Warhol’s “portraits” of Scotch Broth and Chicken Gumbo. And Blum’s decision to keep the paintings together increased their impact.
The exhibition at the Ferus Gallery marked a turning point in Warhol’s career. After Campbell’s Soup Cans, Warhol switched from painting to screen printing, a process that produced more mechanical results and allowed him to create multiple versions of the same work. Its reputation has continued to grow. By 1964, the asking price for a single can of soup that wasn’t in Blum’s decor had climbed to $ 1,500, and New York socialites wore paper dresses in a printed soup tin – made on measure by Warhol himself – at gallery openings.
It didn’t take long for Campbell’s Soups to join in the fun. In the late 1960s, the company jumped on the then popular fad for paper dresses, coming out with the Souper Dress, a funky little number covered in Warhol-esque soup labels. Each dress had three gold stripes at the bottom, so the wearer could cut her dress to the perfect length without cutting into the pattern of the soup can. The price: $ 1 and two labels of Campbell’s soup.
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Today, Warhol soup cans remain an icon of pop culture, ranging from plates and mugs to ties, t-shirts, surfboards and skateboards. One of the most striking images involved Warhol himself – the May 1969 cover of Squire the magazine showed him drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.
Ultimately, Warhol’s Soup Cans were recognized as museum-worthy art, by no less than the Museum of Modern Art. In 1996, the museum purchased Irving Blum’s 32 paintings for over $ 15 million – a staggering return on its $ 1,000 investment in 1962. Even the Supper dress was declared a classic. In 1995, the year before the paintings were sent to MoMA, it became part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
