Andy Warhol Pop Art Andy Warhol Pop Art Food

On July 9, 1962, a little-known artist named Andy Warhol opened a small show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. His head-scratching subject: Campbell's Soup. Each of his 32 paintings portrayed a dissimilar flavor in the lineup, from Love apple to Pepper Pot and Cream of Celery.

For Warhol, non quite 34 years old, it was his first solo painting showroom. By then, he'd spent almost a decade as a top commercial artist, working with loftier-stop advert clients like Tiffany & Co. and Dior. But he was determined to become a "real" creative person, recognized by museums and critics alike. His secret weapon? The emerging "Pop" art style.

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What Did the Soup Can Paintings Mean?

Artist Andy Warhol with one of his later Campbell'south-themed  projects

Mario De Biasi/Mondadori/Getty Images

Popular turned traditional art upside downward. Instead of portraits, landscapes, battle scenes or other subjects that experts idea of equally "fine art," artists like Warhol took images from advertising, comic books and other bits of popular culture—the "pop" in Popular art. They used sense of humour and irony to comment on how mass product and consumerism had come to dominate so much of American life and civilization. Abstruse artists of the 1950s similar Jackson Pollock may have glorified themselves as creative, individualist geniuses, but Pop artists of the 1960s took the opposite approach. They tried to smooth over or eliminate all traces of their ain fine art-making processes—like brush strokes—and so that their work seemed nearly mechanical, like the mass-produced subject field matter it portrayed.

About. To make the "Campbell's Soup Can" paintings, Warhol projected the prototype of a soup can onto his blank sail, traced the outline and details, and so carefully filled it in using old-fashioned brushes and pigment. For consistency, he used a hand stamp to make the fleur-de-lys pattern around each characterization'southward bottom border, merely he didn't always go information technology right. Small details—tiny splashes of red on the Tomato plant Soup painting, the unevenly applied fleur-de-lys stamp on others—betrayed the paintings' handmade origins. In using art techniques to depict an everyday manufactured object, Warhol captured an essential contradiction in Pop fine art. Although they were supposed to look like they'd been made mechanically, every painting was slightly different—and non only in the flavor on the label.

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Simply in that location's one matter all 32 paintings have in common. Instead of detailing the intricate medallion at the center of every can's label—representing the "golden medal of excellence" that Campbell's Soup won at the 1900 Paris Exposition—Warhol substituted a plain gold circle. "Is it but because other paints don't stick well on acme of aureate? Because getting the medals merely correct would take also much work and might never expect practiced, anyway?" pondered Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik. "Did he merely like the gold circumvolve's graphic punch?"

Graphic dial—and an air of nostalgia—may be ii reasons Warhol chose Campbell'due south product line as his Pop icon. The classic label design had changed little since its turn-of-the-20th-century debut, including the homey, cursive "Campbell's" script, which co-ordinate to a visitor archivist, was very similar to founder Joseph Campbell'due south ain signature. And Warhol himself had grown up with Campbell's soup. "I used to drink information technology," he said. "I used to have the same luncheon every day for 20 years."

How Were the Soup Tin can Paintings Beginning Received?

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When Warhol'due south show opened in 1962, Pop was just getting started. People had no idea what to make of fine art that was then different from everything that art was supposed to exist.

For i thing, Irving Blum, one of the owners of Ferus Gallery, chose to brandish the paintings on narrow shelves running the length of the gallery, non unlike a supermarket alley. "Cans sit on shelves," he later said about his installation. "Why non?"

The show didn't make the splash Blum and Warhol hoped for. In fact, what little response that came from either the public or art critics could be harsh. "This immature 'artist' is either a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan," one critic wrote. A drawing in the Los Angeles Times lampooned the paintings and their supposed viewers. "Frankly, the cream of asparagus does nothing for me," one art lover says to another, standing in the gallery. "But the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodle gives me a existent Zen feeling." An art dealer downwards the street from Ferus Gallery was fifty-fifty more biting. He arranged real cans of Campbell'due south Soup in his window, along with a sign that read: "Exercise Non Exist Misled. Become the Original. Our Low Cost – 2 for 33 Cents."

Despite information technology all, Blum managed to sell five paintings—mostly to friends, including actor Dennis Hopper. But even before the bear witness closed, he did an abrupt changeabout. Realizing the paintings worked best as a complete fix, Blum bought dorsum the ones he'd sold. He agreed to pay Warhol $1,000 for all 32 paintings, paid over ten months. Warhol was thrilled—he'd always thought of "Campbell's Soup Cans" every bit a set. For both artist and dealer, the decision was a "canny" move that would pay off large-fourth dimension downward the road.

Why Did the Paintings Become Such a Sensation?

Left: Campbell's 'Souper' wearing apparel, a paper mode inspired past Andy Warhol's Pop soup can paintings.

Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP via Getty Images

Once the public and the critics got over their stupor, they warmed to Warhol's soup cans. For one thing, they fabricated art fun. How hard could it be to understand a painting when the original was probably on your kitchen shelf? Critics started to see the sly, ironic humor in Warhol'southward "portraits" of Scotch Broth and Chicken Gumbo. And Blum's decision to keep the paintings together heightened their impact.

The evidence at Ferus Gallery marked a turning point in Warhol'south career. Later on the "Campbell's Soup Cans," Warhol switched from painting to silkscreen press, a process that produced more than mechanical-looking results and allowed him to create multiple versions of a unmarried work. His reputation connected to rise. By 1964, the request price for a unmarried soup can painting not in Blum's set had shot upwards to $1,500, and New York socialites were wearing newspaper dresses in a soup tin can impress—custom-fabricated past Warhol himself—to gallery openings.

Information technology didn't take long for Campbell's Soups itself to join the fun. In the tardily 1960s, the company jumped on the then-popular fad for newspaper dresses, coming out with the Souper Dress, a kicky piddling number covered in Warhol-esque soup labels. Each dress had three golden bands at the bottom, so the wearer could snip her dress to the ideal length without cutting into the soup can pattern. The price: $1 and ii Campbell's Soup labels.

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Today, Warhol soup cans remain a pop culture icon, turning up on everything from plates and mugs to neckties, t-shirts, surfboards and skateboard decks. One of the near hit images involved Warhol himself—the May 1969 cover of Esquire magazine showed him drowning in a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup.

In the end, Warhol's soup cans were recognized as museum-worthy art, by no less than The Museum of Modernistic Art. In 1996, the museum bought the 32 paintings from Irving Blum every bit a combination gift and sale valued upwardly of $15 million—a jaw-dropping return on his $1,000 investment in 1962. Even the Souper Dress has been declared a classic. In 1995—the year earlier the paintings went to MoMA—information technology became role of the drove of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/andy-warhol-1962-soup-can-paintings-meaning-reaction

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