Andy Warhol

Galerie Hans Meyer, Düsseldorf
Onnasch Collection, Berlin
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 6 February 2003, Lot 37
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Berlin, Onnasch Galerie, Warhol, 1987
Bremen, Neues Museum Weserberg, long term loan, 1994-1997
Barcelona, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Porto, Museu de Arte Contemporanea Serralves, Onnasch: Aspects of Contemporary Art, 2001-02

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although they are brighter and more vibrant in the original, and the illustration fails to convey the metallic sheen of the bronze paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are a few faint and unobtrusive handling marks to the centre of the bottom edge, and two more 50cm from the bottom left corner towards the left edge. Close inspection reveals hairline cracks in places to the overturn edge. There is a very small area of paint loss 23cm from the top right corner along the top edge. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals scattered spots of retouching in the black areas to all four corner edges.
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Warhol was a tireless innovator who constantly sought new ways of reinvesting his favourite motifs with new meaning. By the mid-1980s his Campbell’s Soup paintings had become as universally recognised and famous as the as the product itself - icons of the everyday in their own right that had led Ivan Karp to announce that, “Tomato soup will never be the same again.” This is something that Warhol himself acknowledged in the series of monumental ‘retrospective’ Campbell’s canvases he made in 1985: these works took the iconic brand he had made his own more than twenty years earlier and flattened it across a large canvas. In order to achieve the effect of absolute flatness, something he had sought and continually refined in his paintings from the start, rather than using tinned cans of Campbell’s soup, this time he looked to brand’s brightly coloured, mass-produced cardboard boxes. Flattening their forms to fit the large, two dimensional format of the canvas, Warhol fused the serial flatness of works like 100 Campbell’s Soup Cans with the sculptural forms of his earliest Campbells Soup Boxes. The resulting paintings are late masterpieces which rank amongst the most complex, symbolic and technically assured of his career.

Today, the Campbell’s Soup paintings are amongst the most iconic images of the twentieth century. More than any other subject, it embodies Warhol’s profound impact within Post-War American art and culture. Like the inspiration for much of his paintings, the thinking behind the choice of Campbell’s Soup as a subject was wonderfully simple. “I love it,” Warhol explained. “I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use everyday and never think about. I’m working on soups and I’ve been doing some paintings of money. I just do it because I like it” (the artist cited in: David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1995, p. 90). In choosing to depict such a popular motif, he was tapping into the nostalgia of every American. The Campbell’s Soup label had not changed for more than fifty years and the price of a can had held steady for forty. As Warhol’s comments about Coca-Cola make clear, it represented an enduring testament to American consumerism and common experience.

Even if one disregards the rich significance and symbolism tied up with these late Campbell’s Soup paintings, they provide some of the most technically complex and visually arresting compositions of his career. Importantly, it was the success of the first Campbell’s Soup paintings that encouraged Warhol to pursue the commercial, mass-produced aesthetic of work. This in turn led him to create his first paintings using a mechanical silkscreen - a relatively new and unexplored printing technique which allowed him to divorce his hand further from the creative process and that facilitated the ‘authorless’ repetition to which he had aspired in his first, hand-painted images. The silkscreen revolutionised Warhol’s working technique and led to the creation of his so called ‘Factory’. The first images he made using it were the series of one and two Dollar Bills in early 1962, and their grainy multiplicity immediately appealed to his view of himself as a kind of ‘art machine’.

Executed more than twenty years later, the present work illustrates the degree to which he perfected the silkscreen’s aesthetic as well as technical potential in the intervening years. Assertively flat and removed of extraneous, hand-painted excess, the entire image is created from different layers of colour; each one carefully registered one on top of the other. Here Warhol employs a subtle variety in tone and outline with each screen layer that gives the overall an optical sense of illusory depth that he sets in a state of permanent flux against the flatness of the surface and the soup box image. This visual tension further enhances the monumental grandeur and iconic status of the motif, whilst its layered construction alludes to the numerous meanings associated with it at this late stage in his career.

The series importantly took his much-celebrated appropriation of everyday consumer motifs one step further by reusing his own world famous, signature motif - one that was synonymous not only with ‘the Warhol brand’ but with the whole Pop Art era. It continued the theme that he had begun several years earlier in his ‘Art from Art’ series: that of appropriating iconic images from art history. Like with his flattened, day-glow interpretations of Munch’s The Scream, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa  and Matisse’s Blue Woman, in these late Campbell’s Soup paintings, he subjects his own work through a similar process of transformation; one in which all brushwork and expression is entirely consumed by the authorless perfection of the ‘Warhol machine’. By doing so, he was not only making a statement about the increasing commoditisation of art in general, (one of the key themes that recurs in his work), and of the staggering success and popularity of his art, but also consciously underlining his own importance within art history.

In the years leading up to Warhol’s death in 1987, his thoughts were increasingly preoccupied with an awareness of his own impending mortality. Turning a full circle of the motif that had become inseparable from his own persona, his decimated treatment of the flattened, empty box and its blackened corners encourages comparison with his first ‘torn label’ Soup paintings of 1962 that David Bourdon had famously likened to “Momento Mori; metaphorical reminders that all things must die; even packaged food, after all has a limited shelf life” (Ibid. p. 92).