Andy Warhol Soup Cans

Artist Andy Warhol once said "art is about liking things" and he must have been very fond of Campell's soup cans because he painted quite a few of them. Warhol took ordinary objects from popular culture and emphasised them in ways that made them into iconic 'art'. The soup can, in all its mundaneness was a familiar object to millions of people...by removing it from it's usual domestic context and placing it in a space normally reserved for revered works of art he was at once mocking the "seriousness' of the art establishment (even unconsciously) and at the same time elevating pouplar culture to the level of art.

Warhol produced 32 works on the Campbell's soup can theme and the canvases uniformly measure 510 mm by 410 mm. They were painted in 1962, using a silkscreen printing method and each can displaying the varieties of soup Campbells had on offer at the time.

The movement known as Pop Art emerged first in England in the mid 1950's and spread across the Atlantic to the US a few years later. During this time, artists became interested in mass media and the consumer products that were being marketed everywhere.The postwar period of the 50's and 60's saw a commercial boom as, after the austerity of the war years, people had more disposable income to spend.

Andy Warhol

Of the American pop Art movement, Warhol is perhaps the most famous...he was a notoriously strange character and it's hard to know for sure whether works like the Campbell soup can series and later his series on Mariyn Monroe are imbued with any sort of cyncism about his contemporary world or whether they come from a certain naive affection and affinity for the world he lived in. It certainly served him well on a personal level. Reputedly, he had a postive view of modern culture and had a tendency to look at everything with an interested, artists eye, however ordinary. As he said himself, "I like boring things".

Andy Warhol had been a successful graphic artist/illustrator who worked in advertising himself; he understood the industry and its nuances. That is, he had a good idea of what triggered recognition in the public psyche. Many of his projects, not just in Pop Art but in film and music as well, were avant garde and challenging - at the very least least they compelled people think about what was going on around them and to recognise the iconic in popular culture.

"Art is what you can get away with."~ Andy Warhol

In any case, perhaps because he was the first to paint an ordinary object with such glaring and daring obviousness, the Campbell's soup cans were hugely successful for Warhol, while he was alive and especially after he died. In 1962 you could buy a work such as Small Torn Campbell’s Soup Can for a paltry 30 dollars, yet the same work was purchased recently for $11.7 million..a massive escalation in price.

The Campbell's series was something of a watershed in modern art, as it was now possible to be an artist without the passion and the feeling...Warhol was cool. Art critic Robert Hughes put it succinctly in his series, American Visions when he said of Warhol:

(without realising it) He was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity - the famous image of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity