Before Andy Warhol was the Pop Art icon that he is know as today, he was a commercial illustrator.
And, Quite a successful one too, known for his blotted-ink drawings of shoes for advertisements,
and designs of album covers.
For years, he worked with pop motifs, and admired the works of Robert Rauschenberg and
Jasper Johns, but always as an outsider. At this time, he didn’t have his own subject
or style as a fine artist.
Following the work of European Pop artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, Warhol
made an artwork featuring a Coca Cola bottle. But instead of collage or using the brand
as a component in the work as they had, the bottle was the sole motif.
Warhol simplified the bottle to a graphic image, placed beside it’s recognizable logo.
It was too subjective. Warhol couldn’t resist the painterly brushstrokes that one would
associate with abstract expressionism. They undermined the otherwise detached, coolness of the image.
Warhol would continue to experiment with style and subjects in his paintings: black and white
paintings of photos from a newspaper, allowing drips of paint to fall from the text.
He often asked for suggestions of what to paint, and when one person suggested the most
pervasive piece of pop culture - like a dollar bill or a stick of chewing gum - Warhol would
begin to take images that were already really popular, and filled with mass appeal. He would
begin to make images as bold and brash as the advertisements themselves.
Warhol believed that there were were two ways to interpret the icons and artifacts of the
consumer boom: 1. The idealized perfect people and objects
as cliches or classicism; or 2. seen as crass or exploitative.
This “low” motif’s psychological tension was full of possibilities.
For twenty years, Warhol had the same exact lunch every single day: A slice of bread and
a can of Campbell’s soup. And he decided to paint the can of very variety of Campbell’s soup.
While he couldn’t find a gallery that would show his work in New York, he did find one
in Los Angeles. In July of 1962, at Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery, 32 paintings of Andy
Warhol’s Campbell's Soup Cans were exhibited.
They hung in a single horizontal line, supported by a very shallow, white shelf. Not unlike
the shelf of a grocery store.
For Warhol, these were the most literal depiction of mass consumption.
These paintings were silkscreened, which is a printmaking method originally used for advertising.
It’s a semi-mechanized process, in which he can paint the base image of the can over
and over on different canvases. And then he would go in and hand-paint or stencil the
individual names of the soup varieties.
Gone were the individual’s stokes from the artist’s hands, it’s absence replaced
with a cold detachedness.
The repetitive nature parodies the methods of modern advertising, the bombardment of
the same image over and over in order to infiltrate the consumer’s consciousness.
This uniformity also went against the traditional art market - art was supposed to unique, and
rare and precious. Not mass produced.
These soup cans would not only become the defining work of Andy Warhol’s fine art
career, but Pop Art itself - it’s obsession with mass production and consumer culture.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you want to keep learning more about Andy Warhol,
head over to my blog at littlearttalks.com
I’ll have a blog post linked below more about Andy Warhol’s later works.
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Warhol often asked for suggestions of what to paint, and when one person suggested the
most pervasive piece of pop culture