Campbell’s beef consomme soup was a commercial illustrator before embarking on painting. Warhol produced a wide variety of art works depicting Campbell’s Soup cans during three distinct phases of his career, and he produced other works using a variety of images from the world of commerce and mass media.
Today, the Campbell’s Soup cans theme is generally used in reference to the original set of paintings as well as the later Warhol drawings and paintings depicting Campbell’s Soup cans. Warhol arrived in New York City in 1949, directly from the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1960, Warhol began producing his first canvases, which he based on comic strip subjects. In late 1961, he learned the process of silkscreening from Floriano Vecchi, who had run the Tiber Press since 1953. Stencils such as this are the basis for silkscreening. Although Warhol had produced silkscreens of comic strips and of other pop art subjects, he supposedly relegated himself to soup cans as a subject at the time to avoid competing with the more finished style of comics by Roy Lichtenstein. Irving Blum was the first dealer to show Warhol’s soup can paintings.
Black font coloring is visible in Clam Chowder and Beef canvases from Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962. Golden banners make the Cheddar Cheese canvas from Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962 unique. Campbell’s Soup can portraits, each representing a particular variety of the Campbell’s Soup flavors available at the time. A postcard dated June 26, 1962 sent by from Irving Blum states ” 32 ptgs arrived safely and look beautiful. The exhibition opened on July 9, 1962, with Warhol absent.
The thirty-two single soup can canvases were placed in a single line, much like products on shelves, each displayed on narrow individual ledges. The contemporary impact was uneventful, but the historical impact is considered today to have been a watershed. The Ferus show closed on August 4, 1962, the day before Marilyn Monroe’s death. Warhol went on to purchase a Monroe publicity still from the film Niagara, which he later cropped and used to create one of his most well-known works: his painting of Marilyn. Example of the variations that Irving Blum saw when determining to introduce him by exhibit. Several anecdotal stories supposedly explain why Warhol chose Campbell’s Soup cans as the focal point of his pop art. One reason is that he needed a new subject after he abandoned comic strips, a move taken in part due to his respect for the refined work of Roy Lichtenstein.
Muriel Latow was then an aspiring interior decorator, and owner of the Latow Art Gallery in the East 60s in Manhattan. She told Warhol that he should paint “Something you see every day and something that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell’s Soup. Another account of Latow’s influence on Warhol holds that she asked him what he loved most, and because he replied “money” she suggested that he paint U. According to this story, Latow later advised that in addition to painting money he should paint something else very simple, such as Campbell’s Soup cans. In an interview for London’s The Face in 1985, David Yarritu asked Warhol about flowers that Warhol’s mother made from tin cans.
David Yarritu: I heard that your mother used to make these little tin flowers and sell them to help support you in the early days. It’s very easy and you just make flowers out of them. Warhol did not choose the cans because of business relationships with the Campbell Soup Company. Even though the company at the time sold four out of every five cans of prepared soup in the United States, Warhol preferred that the company not be involved “because the whole point would be lost with any kind of commercial tie-in. Warhol had a positive view of ordinary culture and felt the abstract expressionists had taken great pains to ignore the splendor of modernity. His pop art work differed from serial works by artists such as Monet, who used series to represent discriminating perception and show that a painter could recreate shifts in time, light, season, and weather with hand and eye. Warhol is now understood to represent the modern era of commercialization and indiscriminate “sameness.
Contrasting against Caravaggio’s sensual baskets of fruit, Chardin’s plush peaches, or Cézanne’s vibrant arrangements of apples, the mundane Campbell’s Soup Cans gave the art world a chill. Warhol clearly changed the concept of art appreciation. Instead of harmonious three-dimensional arrangements of objects, he chose mechanical derivatives of commercial illustration with an emphasis on the packaging. In Europe, audiences had a very different take on his work.