Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Pop Art

Whenever Warhol first exhibited Campbell’s Soup Cans, in 1962, each of the thirty-two canvases rested on a rack attached to the wall, like food in a store. The sheer number of paintings corresponds toward types of soup then offered by the Campbell Soup Company. Warhol assigned an alternative soup variety every single, checking all of them off on something record given by Campbell once their “portraits” were finished.

Gallery label from onto Pop, September 29, 2010-April 25, 2011

Warhol made these paintings utilizing a multi-step procedure. First, a pencil underdrawing for the soup cans outline had been made for each canvas, possibly by tracing a projection of a drawing. Then, the can and label had been coated by hand, in addition to lettering per variety ended up being projected and painted onto each canvas. Finally, the silver fleur-de-lis at the end of every can had been applied with a stamp slice from a rubber eraser. Despite this systematic method, you can find subtle discrepancies on the list of paintings. For instance, the reds and whites vary slightly in tone from a single canvas to a higher, therefore the fleur-de-lis imprints vary with each successive stamp.

Gallery label from Andy Warhol: Campbell's Soup Cans also Works, 1953–1967, April 25–October 18, 2015

"I do not believe art should really be limited to the choose couple of, " Warhol thought, "i do believe it should be for the size for the US individuals." Like many Pop designers, Warhol utilized pictures of currently proven interest huge audiences: comic pieces, adverts, photographs of rock-music and movie stars, tabloid news shots. In Campbell's Soup Cans he reproduced an object of size consumption when you look at the most literal good sense. When he very first exhibited these canvases—there are thirty-two of them, how many soup varieties Campbell's after that offered—each one at the same time hung from wall, like a painting, and stood on a shelf, like groceries in a shop.

Saying the same picture on same scale, the canvases worry the uniformity and ubiquity regarding the Campbell's might. Simultaneously, they subvert the notion of painting as a medium of creation and originality. Aesthetic repetition with this kind had always been employed by marketers to drum product brands in to the public consciousness; here, however, it indicates maybe not lively competitors but a complacent abundance. Outside an art gallery, the Campbell's label, which hadn't altered in over fifty years, was not an attention-grabber but a banality. As Warhol stated of Campbell's soup, "I familiar with drink it. We used to have exactly the same meal every day, for two decades, I guess, exactly the same thing repeatedly."

Book excerpt through the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, nyc: The Museum of contemporary Art, revised 2004, initially posted 1999, p. 260