Cambells Soup

Campbell's Soup Cans (sometimes referred to as 32 Campbell's Soup Cans)[1] is a work of art produced in 1962 by Andy Warhol. It consists of 32 canvases, each measuring 20 inches in height Ч 16 inches in width (50.8 Ч 40.6 cm) and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can -- one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time.[2] The individual paintings were produced with a semi-mechanized silkscreen process, using a non-painterly style. Campbell's Soup Cans' reliance on themes from popular culture helped to usher in pop art as a major art movement.

For Warhol, a commercial illustrator who became a successful author, painter, and film director, the work was his first one-man gallery exhibition as a fine artist.[3][4] First exhibited in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles, it marked the West Coast debut of pop art.[5] The combination of the semi-mechanized process, the non-painterly style, and the commercial subject initially caused offense, as the work's blatantly mundane commercialism represented a direct affront to the technique and philosophy of abstract expressionism. The abstract expressionism art movement was dominant during the post-war period, and it held not only to "fine art" values and aesthetics but also to a mystical inclination. This controversy led to a great deal of debate about the merits and ethics of such work. Warhol's motives as an artist were questioned, and they continue to be topical to this day. The public commotion helped transform Warhol from being an accomplished 1950s commercial illustrator to a notable fine artist, and it helped distinguish him from other rising pop artists. Although commercial demand for his paintings was not immediate, Warhol's association with the subject led to his name becoming synonymous with the Campbell's Soup can paintings.

Warhol subsequently 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. As a result of the eventual popularity of the entire series of similarly themed works, Warhol's reputation grew to the point where he was not only the most-renowned American pop art artist,[6] but also the highest-priced living American artist.[7]

Contents [hide]

1 Early career

1.1 New York art scene

1.2 Pop art

2 The premiere

3 Motivation

4 Message

5 Variations

6 Conclusion

7 Notes

8 References

[edit] Early career

[edit] New York art scene

Warhol arrived in New York City in 1949, directly from the Carnegie Institute of Technology.[8] He quickly achieved success as a commercial illustrator, and his first published drawing appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of Glamour Magazine.[9] In 1952, he had his first art gallery show at the Bodley Gallery with a display of Truman Capote-inspired works.[10] By 1955, he was tracing photographs borrowed from the New York Public Library's photo collection with the hired assistance of Nathan Gluck, and reproducing them with a process he had developed earlier as a collegian at Carnegie Tech. His process, which foreshadowed his later work, involved pressing wet ink illustrations against adjoining paper.[11] During the 50s, he had regular showings of his drawings. He even exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (Recent Drawings, 1956).[8]

[edit] Pop art

Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964. Example of Warhol's first exhibit with Costelli.

Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato), 1962. Stencils such as this are the basis for silkscreening.

In 1960, Warhol began producing his first canvases, which he based on comic strip subjects.[12] In late 1961, he learned the process of silkscreening from Floriano Vecchi,[13] who had run the Tiber Press since 1953. Though the process generally begins with a stencil drawing, it often evolves from a blown up photograph which is then transferred with glue onto silk. In either case, one needs to produce a glue-based version of a positive two-dimensional image (positive means that open spaces are left where the paint will appear). Usually, the ink is rolled across the medium so that it passes through the silk and not the glue.[14] Campbell's Soup cans were among Warhol's first silkscreen productions; the first were U.S. dollar bills. The pieces were made from stencils; one for each color. Warhol did not begin to convert photographs to silkscreens until after the original series of Campbell's Soup cans had been produced.[15]

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.[16] In fact, he once said "I've got to do something that really will have a lot of impact that will be different enough from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing."[13] In February 1962, Lichtenstein displayed at a sold-out exhibition of cartoon pictures at Leo Castelli's eponymous Leo Castelli Gallery, ending the possibility of Warhol exhibiting his own cartoon paintings.[17] In fact, Castelli had visited Warhol's gallery in 1961 and said that the work he saw there was too similar to Lichtenstein's,[18][19] although Warhol's and Lichtenstein's comic artwork differed in subject and techniques (e.g., Warhol's comic-strip figures were humorous pop culture caricatures such as Popeye, while Lichtenstein's were generally of stereotypical hero and heroines, inspired by comic strips devoted to adventure and romance).[20] Castelli chose not to represent both artists at that time, but he would, in 1964, exhibit Warhol works such as reproductions of Campbell's Juice Boxes (pictured below right) and Brillo Soap Boxes.[21] He