Andy Warhol

You never had commercial art – apples, tomato cans, or soup cans before.  You may have had a still life in general, but you never had a still life that had been passed through the mass media.  Here, for the first time, is an urban art which does not sentimentalize the urban image but uses it as it is found.  That is something unusual.  It may be one of the first times that art focuses on the objects that the human being has created or played with, rather than on the human being.

    - Claes Oldenburg, interviewed by Bruse Glaser, 1965

Through his serial treatment of the ubiquitous Campbell’s soup can, a commercially prepared soup in a mass-produced can becomes an emblem for society as whole.  Equal importance was given to this subject matter, as well as other commercial items, in the early 1960's and Warhol himself quickly became one of his own creations - everyday item turned celebrity.  With the first exhibition of Campbell's Soup Cans at Los Angeles's Ferus Gallery in 1962, Warhol opened our eyes to a new aesthetic which took the ordinary and made it extraordinary. 

By distancing himself from the act of painting through the mechanical nature of the screening process, Warhol was making another statement about the nature of what art was, should and could be.  The present work, an isolated can rendered in a vibrant red spot-lit against a solid black ground, commands immediate attention.  The highly graphic and flat nature of the canvas further illuminates the iconic stature of the object.  Though a seemingly simple subject, the present work exudes a most forceful power.

Warhol’s first Pop paintings examine the relationship between big business and the common man through enlarged icons of consumerism like Coca Cola and Campbell’s soup.  Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can provides a witty extension of contemporary questions concerning the roles of originality and seriality in art and culture.  Through the act of repetition and elevation to an Art Form, Warhol commands attention to his soup and demands that they be reconsidered.  The cans shed their boring, everyday cloak of invisibility and become objects worth contemplating.  No longer just a symbol of the Campbell’s Soup Company, the instantly recognizable label becomes a symbol of American culture itself.