CAMPBELL'S SOUP CANS
ANDY WARHOL
1- The painting :
Synthetic polymer paint on 32 canvases. Each canvas is 20x16" (50.8x40.6cm). It is exhibited at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York (U.S.A.)
Campbell's Soup Cans is also known as “32 Campbell Soup Andy Warhol”.
Warhol first exhibited these Campbell's soup can paintings on July 9th 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los
Angeles in California. This exhibition marked the West Coast debut of pop art.
2- Who was Andy Warhol ?
Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and died in 1987 in New York.
3- Sociological Context :
Sociological context :
The 60s in America are the symbol of prosperity in America. It is a full employment period and the
American economy is in very good health so people are happy, have money and consume a lot. It is the
start of the supermarkets and therefore of the over consumption.
Many artistic impulses began to gain momentum in the mid-1960s: an explosion of consumerism
reverberated in the paintings of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and in the sculptures of Claes
Oldenburg and George Segal, whose works embraced elements of popular culture.
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Consumerism suggests that happiness can be achieved through the purchase of goods and services. In
1962, President John F. Kennedy introduced the Consumer Bill of Rights, which stated that the public
has a right to be safe, to be informed, to choose, and to be heard. American consumerism exploded in
the 1950s and continued into the 1960s with purchases of cars, houses, televisions, furniture, and
modern appliances.
Movies, records, and television spurred sales of products through advertising and product placement.
During the 1960s, fast food chains spread nationwide, opening near strip malls in the new commercial
districts of the suburbs.
For example, Mac Donald's company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by Richard and
Maurice Mac Donald; in 1948 they reorganized their business as a hamburger stand using production
line principles. Businessman Ray Kroc joined the company as a franchise agent in 1955. He
subsequently purchased the chain from the McDonald brothers and oversaw its worldwide growth.
4- What is the pop art ?
In the 1960s young artists in the United States and England made popular culture their subject matter by
appropriating images and objects such as common household items, advertisements from consumer
products, celebrity icons, fast food, cartoons, and mass-media imagery from television, magazines, and
newspapers. The Pop Art style sought to test the boundaries between art and life.
The origin of Pop Art can be traced back to 1917, Marcel Duchamp asserted that any object could be art
if only he intended it as such. But till 1940s after the war II, the term “Pop Art” emerged in UK that
suffered great economic hardship. Only several artists independently adopted Pop art as an
experimental form, others would later become synonymous with the visual art movement.
Andy Warhol become famous as the "Pope of Pop" by using the new pop art style. The popular subjects
in art of Andy Warhol could be part of his palette. Cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint
drips are the main images in early Warhol paintings. In April 1961, New York Department's window
display a backdrop, in which shows the first Andy Warhol pop art. Soon all traces of the artist's "hand" in
the production of pop art Andy Warhol was removed.
The entire series of works by Andy Warhol was popular so that his reputation grew to the point, the artist
was thought both the most famous pop art artist and the highest-priced living artist in USA.
Andy Warhol wanted to show that “ America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy
essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola and you can
know that the president drinks Coke, that Liz Taylor drinks Coke and just think you can drink Coke too. A
Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner
is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz taylor knows it, the President
knows it and you know it.” Andy Warhol 1975.
5- Analysis of the painting :
Like other Pop artists, Warhol used images of already proven appeal to huge audiences: comic strips,
ads, photographs of rock-music and movie stars, tabloid news shots. In Campbell's Soup Cans he
reproduced an object of mass consumption in the most literal sense. When he first exhibited these
canvases—there are thirty-two of them, the number of soup varieties Campbell's then sold—each one
simultaneously hung from the wall, like a painting, and stood on a shelf, like groceries in a store.
Impact of the technic used
The art was made from stencils in different colours for each one.
The individual paintings were produced with a semi-mechanized silkscreen process, using a nonDominique Wanin Collège Alain Fournier Alban
painterly style. Repeating the same image at the same scale, the silk screen images stress the
uniformity and ubiquity of the Campbell's can and expressed the mood of repetition and banality which
seems to be a consumerist perception of things.
Actually one aspect of consumerism Warhol clearly did love and marvel at was machines and their
precision to create millions of identical copies of a certain thing. This is reflected in his technique by
using a stencil and silk screen printing to create repetitions of the same image. This method has a less
personal feel compared to hand painted images of other artist’s, he even had assistants from the factory
to print his work for him after he had produced a photograph and stencil.
This could reflect the fact that consumerism is based on the notion of goods being produced and
purchased in ever greater amounts. It may even reflect the fact that people conform to consumerism by
purchasing a certain product, just because of advertisements and knowing other people buy it.
The idea of mechanic process, industrialisation of the painting is reflected in Warhol's FACTORY painted
in 1963.
The way the cans are arranged
Warhol assigned a different flavor to each painting, referring to a product list supplied by Campbell's.
There is no evidence that Warhol envisioned the canvases in a particular sequence. Here, they are
arranged in rows that reflect the chronological order in which they were introduced, beginning with
"Tomato" in the upper left, which debuted in 1897.
Colors used
Red, white and yellow
What is the message ?
The initial idea for the soup can series has been credited to the interior designer, and later gallerist,
Muriel Latow who told Warhol he should paint money, “or something people see every day, like a
Campbell’s Soup can” (quoted in G. Indiana, Andy Warhol and the can that sold the world”, New York,
2010, p. 82)
Famously, when Warhol was asked about why he chose to paint Campbell's soup cans, he explained
that it had personal significance to him as a consumer, "Because 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" (A. Warhol, quoted in I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy
Warhol Interviews, p. 18).
The thought behind his work could be reflecting the mundane of everyday life for the working class. For
example Campbell’s soup was a massed produced popular brand with the working class at the time and
would of been consumed weekly or even daily in an average american household, and the fact that
canned soup is not the most exciting of meals is what makes it a mundane image.
6- Conclusion :
Painted in 1962, at the very birth of the Pop art movement, it contains symbolism that shook the
foundations of the art world to its very core. One of the first of Warhol’s silkscreen paintings, the vigorous
outlines and delicate patterns of light and shadow are distilled into a conventional, yet strikingly modern
image which has gone on to influence popular culture for over fifty years. It was also a deeply personal
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work for Warhol. When asked to name which of his works was most special to him, he said it was his
Campbell’s Soup Can. "I love it", he said, adding, "I just paint things I always thought were beautiful,
things you use every day and never think about…. I just do it because I like it" (cited in D. Bourdon,
Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 90).
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