In the more than 60 years since they first went on display, Andy Warhol s 32 Campbell
s Soup Cans have become a canonical symbol of American Pop Art.
Warhol, an American commercial illustrator from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania turned fine
artist, author, publisher, painter, and film director, first showed the work on July 9,
1962 in the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, California.
It was his first solo exhibition.
The show was largely uneventful.
Few people attended, not even Warhol, and a secondary showing planned for New York later
that year was canceled.
Today though, Warhol has his own museum in Pittsburgh and his 32 Campbell s Soup Cans
is one of the prized pieces at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
An earlier, single canvas version (Campbell s Soup Can (Tomato) sold through Christie
s Auction house in 2010 for over $9 million dollars.
32 Campbell s Soup Cans consists of thirty-two 20 16 screen-printed canvases, one for each
of the varieties sold at the time.
They were originally presented linearly, resting on a shelf mounted on the wall in an effort
to mimic the grocery store shopping experience.
For viewers today, the series tends to evoke nostalgia.
Each print has slight variation due to the inconsistency of the silk-screening process
and manual finishing details, and together, they appear touchingly handmade.
In a world saturated with high-tech media marketing and airbrushed ads, it can be hard
to imagine that in the 1960s, Warhol s now ubiquitous art was criticized as sterile,
cold, and mechanical.
At the time, Abstract Expressionism was the movement to watch.
It featured artists such as William de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and priviled
human emotion, painterly styles, and fine art aesthetics.
Pop Art by contrast embraced mundane commercialism.
Contemporary interpretations of Pop Art ranged from a subversive critique of American consumerism
and a warning about the shrinking gap between human and machine, to a legitimation of the
joy products bring to our lives.
Warhol himself once described Pop Art as liking things.
When asked why he painted soup cans, he replied, I used to drink it.
I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years the same thing over and over
again.
Like the commodities he drew inspiration from, Warhol fashioned himself as a commercial product.
He worked out of a studio he called the Factory, employed an assembly-line technique, and his
very persona seemed designed as a product for public consumption: plastic, image driven,
devoid of a narrative sense.
Thus, Warhol s true personality, like his art, is hard to grasp.
While divesting himself of individuality, he was also a master self-promoter, and, though
billed as a prankster, he never gave up the act.
Even his autobiographical 1975 The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is a parody of personal revelation,
full of hollow banality, constantly reasserting the author s own nothingness.
Nevertheless, Warhol s presence in art and popular culture has been huge.
Works like Green Coca-Cola Bottles of 1962, and Brillo Boxes, 1964, pushed the public
to think about material consumption, while his reproductions of news articles depicting
horrific car accidents and portraits of tragic celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor,
and Elvis Presley made us think about our relationship to news and entertainment, and
what that relationship said about us as a society.