And Blum’s decision to keep the paintings together heightened their impact. How hard could it be to understand a painting when the original was probably on your kitchen shelf? Critics started to see the sly, ironic humor in Warhol’s “portraits” of Scotch Broth and Chicken Gumbo. Once the public and the critics got over their shock, they warmed to Warhol’s soup cans. Left: Campbell's 'Souper' dress, a paper fashion inspired by Andy Warhol's Pop soup can paintings.
Why Did the Paintings Become Such a Sensation? For both artist and dealer, the decision was a “canny” move that would pay off big-time down the road. Warhol was thrilled-he’d always thought of “Campbell’s Soup Cans” as a set. He agreed to pay Warhol $1,000 for all 32 paintings, paid over 10 months. Realizing the paintings worked best as a complete set, Blum bought back the ones he’d sold. But even before the show closed, he did an abrupt about-face.
Our Low Price – Two for 33 Cents.”ĭespite it all, Blum managed to sell five paintings-mostly to friends, including actor Dennis Hopper. He arranged real cans of Campbell’s Soup in his window, along with a sign that read: “Do Not Be Misled. “But the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodle gives me a real Zen feeling.” An art dealer down the street from Ferus Gallery was even more biting. “Frankly, the cream of asparagus does nothing for me,” one art lover says to another, standing in the gallery. A cartoon in the Los Angeles Times lampooned the paintings and their supposed viewers. “This young ‘artist’ is either a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan,” one critic wrote. In fact, what little response that came from either the public or art critics could be harsh. The show didn’t make the splash Blum and Warhol hoped for. “Cans sit on shelves,” he later said about his installation.
People had no idea what to make of art that was so different from everything that art was supposed to be.įor one thing, Irving Blum, one of the owners of Ferus Gallery, chose to display the paintings on narrow shelves running the length of the gallery, not unlike a supermarket aisle. When Warhol’s show opened in 1962, Pop was just getting started. “I used to have the same lunch every day for 20 years.” How Were the Soup Can Paintings First Received? And Warhol himself had grown up with Campbell's soup. The classic label design had changed little since its turn-of-the-20th-century debut, including the homey, cursive "Campbell's" script, which according to a company archivist, was very similar to founder Joseph Campbell's own signature. Graphic punch-and an air of nostalgia-may be two reasons Warhol chose Campbell’s product line as his Pop icon. “Did he just like the gold circle’s graphic punch?” “Is it simply because other paints don’t stick well on top of gold? Because getting the medals just right would take too much work and might never look good, anyway?” pondered Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik. Instead of detailing the intricate medallion at the center of every can's label-representing the “gold medal of excellence” that Campbell’s Soup won at the 1900 Paris Exposition-Warhol substituted a plain gold circle. Although they were supposed to look like they’d been made mechanically, every painting was slightly different-and not only in the flavor on the label.īut there’s one thing all 32 paintings have in common. In using fine art techniques to depict an everyday manufactured object, Warhol captured an essential contradiction in Pop art. Small details-tiny splashes of red on the Tomato Soup painting, the unevenly applied fleur-de-lys stamp on others-betrayed the paintings’ handmade origins. For consistency, he used a hand stamp to make the fleur-de-lys pattern around each label’s bottom edge, but he didn’t always get it right. To make the “Campbell’s Soup Can” paintings, Warhol projected the image of a soup can onto his blank canvas, traced the outline and details, then carefully filled it in using old-fashioned brushes and paint. They tried to smooth over or eliminate all traces of their own art-making processes-like brush strokes-so that their work seemed almost mechanical, like the mass-produced subject matter it portrayed.Īlmost. Abstract artists of the 1950s like Jackson Pollock may have glorified themselves as creative, individualist geniuses, but Pop artists of the 1960s took the opposite approach. They used humor and irony to comment on how mass production and consumerism had come to dominate so much of American life and culture. Instead of portraits, landscapes, battle scenes or other subjects that experts thought of as “art,” artists like Warhol took images from advertising, comic books and other bits of popular culture-the “pop” in Pop art. Artist Andy Warhol with one of his later Campbell's-themed projects
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