Campbell’s Soup Cans
Thirty-two soup cans, one for each flavour in the range. Warhol brought everyday mass production into the gallery and turned repetition into art.
Every canvas looks the same, but the flavour names differ – like goods on a shelf.
Andy Warhol made Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962. During the 1950s he had been a successful commercial illustrator in New York, working among other things on shoe advertisements. Around 1960 he began making paintings of comic strips and advertising images. The soup cans were his breakthrough. He claimed that he had eaten Campbell’s soup for lunch for many years, but such statements from Warhol should be taken with a pinch of salt. Warhol was the son of immigrants from present-day Slovakia and grew up in Pittsburgh.
The work consists of 32 canvases, each about 51 × 41 centimetres. Each canvas shows a red-and-white soup can seen straight on. The cans are almost identical, but the labels name different flavours, such as tomato, asparagus, bean and chicken noodle. The number corresponded to the flavours Campbell sold at the time.
The composition could hardly be simpler. Each can stands in the middle of its canvas against a white background, without shadows or setting. When the canvases are hung together they form a grid, like goods on a shop shelf or pages in a catalogue. It is the repetition that matters, not the individual image.
The colours are taken straight from the packaging: red, white, black and a gold medallion. The canvases are painted with synthetic polymer paint. Warhol worked largely by hand but also used mechanical aids to achieve a uniform, industrial look. Shortly afterwards he moved on to silkscreen printing, in which the image is printed through a fabric stencil. That method then became his trademark.
The canvases were first shown in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. They stood on a narrow shelf along the wall, as in a shop. The dealer Irving Blum bought the whole series from Warhol to keep it together. Reactions were mixed. Some saw the work as a joke, others as a provocation against Abstract Expressionism, which was then dominant.
The work has been interpreted as a comment on consumer society and mass production, in which the same product is sold in millions of copies. Warhol himself was often deliberately vague. He said he wanted to be a machine and that he liked things to be the same. The work can be read both as criticism and as a celebration of everyday goods.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the 32 canvases from Blum in 1996. The work is regarded as one of the most important in Pop Art. Warhol returned to the soup cans many times, in paintings, prints and sculptures. Through him the Campbell’s soup can has become an icon, and the question of what separates art from advertising has been central to art ever since.