The Campbell’s soup cans are one of the most famous pop art pieces by Andy Warhol. In this blog you will find out about the creation of this piece, along with some background information on Warhol himself, and the art world of that time.
Towards the end of 1960s, Warhol had already gained a reputation as being a successful pop artist. He was fascinated by mass production, and he believed that it was possible to create art by simply copying what surrounded him in everyday life. The Campbell’s soup cans were created by silkscreening two images on canvas, then attaching them together. One image depicted a can of Campbell’s soup, while the other showed the label on the can.
Warhol began working on his series in 1962 and completed it in late 1963. The original set consisted of 32 canvases; 30 of them were paintings, while 2 were prints. Warhol left his factory to his assistants in order to focus completely on creating his new series of paintings. However, he did supervise the whole process closely and made sure that each piece was perfect before it left the factory.
In 1962, Andy Warhol received a commission from the owners of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles to produce a series of paintings of Campbell’s soup cans. The gallery owners had explained that the idea behind pop art was to make art out of everyday things, and that they thought soup cans would be an ideal subject matter.
The artist took on the project with enthusiasm, as this was an opportunity for him to turn his fascination with mass-produced goods into his first major commercial success. Warhol also used a movie camera to tape the process of painting each piece, which he later incorporated into his own film work.
The commission was concluded in 1963 with the exhibition of 32 paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, California, now known as “The Campbell’s Soup Cans.” There were reportedly 13 people who purchased one of the original paintings from Warhol for $100 each.*
Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans: The Most Expensive Paintings in History?*
Last year, Roy Lichtenstein’s “Sleeping Girl” became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction when it went for $43.8 million dollars at Christie’s in New York. The price for this 1963 painting places it well ahead of Edvard Munch
Pop Art is a form of art that emerged in Britain during the 1950s, marked by its focus on mass-produced objects. Pop Art rejected abstract and formalist art trends of the time, such as Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism, instead focusing on depictions of everyday objects. Pop Art was originally coined by British art critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954 to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of popular, inexpensive items from supermarkets and American iconography.
Travis Louie’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” series highlights the most popular soup brands and conveys the importance of corporate logotypes within the pop culture landscape. The repetition of these cans showcasing Campbell’s brand name creates a stream of consciousness visual representation for consumers. Louie said he was interested in using a “serious” approach to convey ideas about branding and product placement within our culture.
This artwork is featured in the exhibition Warhol: From A to B and Back Again at the Pace Gallery in New York City through March 7, 2012.
The question of whether Andy Warhol’s legendary Campbell’s Soup Can series is art or illustration has been debated for years. The series, created in 1962, consists of thirty-two canvases depicting a single Campbell’s soup can in various colors and stages of deconstruction.
Titled “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” the paintings were exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City. The works were immediately proclaimed as both a commercial homage to consumerism and as an artistic icon of the Pop Art movement.
The debate over Warhol’s intent was reignited when a set of six paintings from his 1964 “Death and Disaster” series sold for $105 million at auction on November 25, 2013. The auction record marks the first time that Warhol paintings have sold for over $100 million. The sale included three silk screens of car crashes, two suicides by gun and one fatal car accident.
Warhol originally created the “Death and Disaster” series to adorn the walls of his lavish new studio in New York City. He reportedly got the idea after the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963. The first work in this set was titled “Car Crash.”
However, with their iconic imagery, silkscreen
No matter how many times you look at a painting, it will never change. It’s a one-way relationship. The painting sits patiently on its canvas, and we walk around it, admiring or criticizing it. But the painting doesn’t respond. It’s an object, as passive as a stone.
When Andy Warhol made his soup cans, he changed that relationship between viewer and art forever. His soup cans were radically different from any other paintings ever made; they were not passive objects but active experiences. In fact, they were even more than that: they were movies played out in real time on the canvas.
Telling the story of how Warhol achieved that effect is one of my favorite topics to talk about when I’m giving a tour of my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University’s Andy Warhol Museum. And I always start that story with Campbell’s Soup Cans because it was the first thing Warhol produced that used that technique—and because it was also the first thing he produced after he moved to Pittsburgh in 1962 to work for the family business.*
Warhol’s soup cans are not really soup cans: they are images of soup cans, mass produced in an industrial process and sold in supermarkets for home use. They are iconic images of
By 1964, Andy Warhol had already made a name for himself as a painter and as a filmmaker. Both of these aspects of his work were dependent upon the use of repetition. In his films, he would repeat an image over and over again. In his paintings, he would repeat an image over and over again.
What Andy Warhol did not do was simply repeat an image once. His work was about repetition, but it was also about subtraction. He would remove parts from the repeated images to make them even more repetitive, and then he would remove more parts to make them even more repetitive still.
Towards the end of 1963, Warhol found himself with several months off between projects. He decided to try something new: he wanted to make one painting every day. He wanted to focus on the process itself; whatever he produced was going onto the canvas without any revisions or corrections afterwards. He wanted each piece to be completely automatic — no thinking allowed.
Andy Warhol started out in his studio at 33 Union Square West in Manhattan by taping five Campbell’s Soup Cans together and painting them white.* He then began turning these five canvases into copies of the same painting…
In this article I will be taking a close look at Warhol’s work for the Campbell Soup Company. I believe that this is a fantastic piece of pop art. It is simple, it is iconic, and it has stood the test of time.
It was very influential on Warhol’s contemporaries, and created quite a stir when it was first exhibited.
In this essay I will analyse Warhol’s techniques, discuss his influences, and investigate the context in which the painting was created.
Andy Warhol is one of America’s most well known artists. He is noted for his ability to transform everyday objects into works of art. His work had a big influence on the pop art movement of the 1960s.
The Campbell Soup Can paintings were created by Warhol in 1962, just before he had his big breakthrough with Marilyn Monroe and her ‘Campbell’s Soup Can’ dress.
