“Many an afternoon at lunchtime Mom would open a can of Campbell’s for me, because that’s all we could afford, I love it to this day”
In searching for new subject matter, Warhol stumbled upon Campbell’s soup cans and boxes. This mundane product was everything he wanted his art to represent: mass consumerism in culture. “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again. Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea” (Andy Warhol, quoted in: Kenneth Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, Boston 2004, p. 18).
"[A] more extensive study of Warhol’s advertisement designs 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.”
At the core of the artist’s practice was the idea of elevating mass production and consumerism through mechanical reproduction - notions that dominated post-war American life and culture. At this time his chosen medium was screenprinting, as opposed to his earlier hand-traced paintings. This technique allowed his works to remain consistent and achieve the detached aura he coveted, an aesthetic of desensitised reproduction.