Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can

Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can

This soup can was painted by Andy Warhol. He was an artist that was very famous in Pop Art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. Warhol's art encompassed many forms of media, including hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was also a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1984, two years before his death. His studio,The Factory , was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights,Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons.

One evening, when Warhol was thinking of what subject matter to use next, his friend Muriel Latow suggested using the Campbell's soup can as an artistic image. She told him he should paint something that would not be noticed because it was already so familiar to the general public. In addition to being banal and innocuous, the soup can motif was also representative of American values, something that would be recognized by the old, young, rich, or poor.

200 Campbell's Soup Cans at the beginning of what eventually became a long line of mass-produced images, yet it stands out because it was done entirely by hand. In creating 200 Campbell's Soup Cans, Warhol presented his audience with a rather banal image--ubiquitous cans of soup--presented in a grid of ten rows and twenty columns that leaves the borders of the 72- by 100-inch canvas and goes on indefinitely. This painting is one of the ultimate examples that links Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art in the United States because it is representational, yet also retains traces of the painterly tradition.

With Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) Andy Warhol takes as his subject a ubiquitous staple food found in millions of American homes and turns it into high art. With the unique candor he displayed in the best of his early Pop art works he appropriates the curved lines and iconic graphic imagery of a tin of canned soup and re-examines them in the context of their pure visual qualities.

The can of Campbell's Tomato soup can was the ideal subject for Warhol's pioneering kind of appropriation. This particular flavor perfectly suited Warhol's purpose as it one of the original varieties and was still the company's best selling product. Since the first Campbell's soup cans appeared on the shelves 1897 this particular variety hold sold hundreds of millions of units and was instantly recognizable to the population at large. In addition to its omnipresent nature in the supermarkets and grocery stores of America, Campbell's soup cans also appealed to Warhol interest in nature of graphic representation. The basic design of the label had become classic and had become a superb example of conveying information through the minimum of visual means. It was so successful that it had remained unchanged for decades. This fact was not lost on Warhol who, with has training as a graphic artist, appreciated the ability to convey a message with the minimum of visual means.

If Warhol truly became selfless in his work, his 200 Campbell's Soup Cans helps to illustrate the break between his hand in the work itself and the subsequent lack of it when he turned to mass production via the silk-screening process. Warhol's relationship to and connection with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art evolved from Peach Halves, then 200 Campbell's Soup Cans, and continued with the production methods employed at the Factory. Andy Warhol's' Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) is arguably one of the most iconic