A ndy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can from 1962 is an icon of Pop Art and the quintessential image of the artist’s career. Although the subject would recur throughout Warhol’s oeuvre, becoming synonymous with American art from the 1960s, the present work is a rare and early hand-drawn example from the series and speaks to its conceptual origins. Recording the moment that the artist transitioned from a popular artist to Pop Artist, Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can embodies the artist’s groundbreaking synthesis of consumerism and culture, shifting the course art history forever.

A staple on American grocery store shelves for nearly a century by the time Warhol began to render them, Campbell’s soup cans became Warhol’s obsessive focus at the beginning of the 1960s. Warhol presaged the paradigmatic shifts in consumer culture that would define the mid-century, and completed his first Campbell’s Soup Can works as part of a groundbreaking exhibition of 32 paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles 1962. While the Ferus Gallery show catapulted Warhol to stardom, and the works shown therein would later enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the present work was executed in the same year and would inhabit equally as important art historical contexts. Purchased from Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, the present work was part of the collection of Leon Kraushar, a preeminent Pop Art collector who owned seminal works by the artist such as Green Liz, Red Jackie and Orange Marilyn.

The present work, a splendid, rare example of Warhol’s most famed imagery from the 1960s, claims exceptional provenance as it belonged to the prolific Pop art collector Leon Kraushar. Along with top tier collectors of the 1960s such as Robert and Ethel Scull, Kraushar possessed one of the best Pop art collections of his time. He purchased Campbell’s Soup Can directly from Leo Castelli Gallery and one can imagine it hung in Kraushar's home proximate to other Warhol masterworks such as Orange Marilyn, Red Jackie, and Green Liz also purchased directly from Castelli. Kraushar's ownership of these three silkscreens was famously publicized in a July 1965 Life magazine photo-spread entitled "You Bought It, Now Live with It" with the works hanging above his bed. The present work, along with much of Kraushar’s collection, was purchased by the well-known German collector Karl Ströher in the late 1960s following Kraushar's death. Ströher possessed an impressive collection of modern and contemporary works and was one of the first European connoisseurs to include American Pop art in his collection. The current sale presents the unique occasion to acquire an artwork that graced the collections of two of the most prominent patrons of Pop art in the 20^th Century.

Bespeaking Warhol’s previous career as a commercial illustrator, there is a great emphasis placed on a mimetic mode of representation in Campbell’s Soup Can. Describing Warhol’s fidelity to the consumer good, Benjamin Buchloh states: “[A] more extensive study of Warhol’s advertisement design would suggest that the key features of his work of the early 1960s are prefigured in the refined arsenal and manual competence of the graphic designer: extreme close-up fragments and details, stark graphic contrast and silhouetting of forms, schematic simplification, and, most important, of course, rigorous serial compositions” (Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art, in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, 1989, p. 42). The present work is rendered with a painstaking verisimilitude, done by hand but treated as a mass produced good. Enduring as a record of the beginnings of Warhol’s conflation of consumer culture and high art, Campbell’s Soup Can is a critical example from the artist’s oeuvre, that enables a true understanding of the spectrum of his work.