Andy Warhol

Galerie Watari, Tokyo
Acquired from the above by the present owner in August 1987

Colour:The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate.Condition:This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a few fine hairline, unobtrusive tension cracks running intermittently along the extreme outer edges of the box. Further very close inspection reveals a pinhead sized rubmark on the right overturn edge approx. 25cm. from the lower right corner. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a tiny inpainting to the extreme upper right corner tip.
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Andy Warhol’s 'Campbell’s Soup Boxes' represent one of the most iconic symbols of American Pop culture. As an omnipotent signifier of Pop Art aesthetics, the Campbell’s Soup Box radically subverted the heroic gestures of post-war abstract painting by breaking up the dichotomy of high and low culture, of the painterly sublime and the everyday generic, of originality and appropriation. The following three works from a private collection come from a series made by Warhol in the 1980s at a time when the artist revisited some of his most powerful motifs from the 1960s. Featuring two smaller and one large canvas, the Campbell’s Soup Box appear in Warhol’s trademark silkscreen technique imbued with expressively vibrant and luscious colours. In the case of the larger canvas, the exceptional three-dimensional surface infuses the work with a sculptural quality akin to the sculpted everyday objects of American contemporaries such as Robert Gober.

Warhol’s use of the prominent logo of Campbell’s food brand dates back to the early 1960s – the decade that marked Warhol’s apotheosis and transition from commercial illustrator to successful artist. First conceived as an idea over a dinner conversation with friends, gallerist Muriel Latow suggested to Warhol: “You should paint something that everybody sees every day, that everybody recognizes... like a can of soup” (Muriel Latow quoted in: Gary Indiana, Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World, New York 2010, p. 82). The next day Warhol bought every single type of the iconic American soup, ranging from chicken noodle to onion mushroom, which he then meticulously drew onto a larger canvas. This spontaneous outburst of creativity culminated in the production of 32 paintings, which were exhibited in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Although met with a mixed reception – for example, one dealer parodied the show by putting a stack of soup cans on display claiming that these could be purchased much cheaper than Warhol’s version of them at the Ferus Gallery – the show proved a great success and the complete set of 32 works today resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. More than two decades after this revolutionary series, the artist retrospectively reflected on the impact of Campbell’s soup imagery on his career and art history in general and stated that “I should have done the Campbell’s Soups and kept doing them” (Andy Warhol quoted in: Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966’, in: Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes, Eds., October Files, London 2001, p. 30).

Indeed, the impact and significance of the 32 monotonously painted works of canned soups in the 1960s proved to be tremendous and inspired the idea of producing art as a series of nearly identical images. As Warhol could not keep up with the speed of his art production after the exhibition’s success, he became one of the first artists to move away from the medium of painting and make the photo-mechanical reproducible silkscreens his trademark technique. Switching to this new way of producing art not only allowed him to create works quickly, but also to critically appropriate the same means of production used in the advert industry.

Embracing the techniques of mechanical tracing and technological reproducibility enabled Warhol to perform both an acceptance and a subversion of the popular culture and capital-driven advertising industry. On one hand, by contributing to the reproduction of Campbell’s soup imagery, the artist immersed himself into publicly promoting the mainstream trends of contemporary America. By elevating the banal food product to the status of art, Campbell’s Soup Boxes represent a kind of celebration of American capitalism and its ultimate recognisability as a mass-consumer product. On the other hand, Warhol wittily incorporated a critique of the latter by satirically mimicking the repetitiveness and the lack of originality inherent in mass consumerism. This subversive, double-sided reading of the series is emphasised by the artist’s open-ended statement on Campbell’s soup: “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” (Andy Warhol in conversation with Gene R. Swenson, ‘What Is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part I’, Art News, Vol. 62, No. 7, November 1963, p. 26).

Popular and sublime as well as low and high are inevitably blended into an oxymoronic amalgamation of values and meanings. As a factual advertising image, the soup can conveys a matrix of consumer relations, an endless capitalist cycle initiated by the seller, who promotes his product to a potential buyer, who in turn is expected to readily identify it through the use of a recognizable and steady image. Warhol depicts this network of exchanges by appropriating its most potent advertising symbols, and therein locating them at great distance from issues of artistic intent. Revisiting one of his most famous and important motifs, the present works are a manifestation of Warhol’s artistic legacy as one of the most influential artists of the Twentieth Century.