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Lot Essay
"If a man takes 50 Campbell's soup cans and puts them on canvas, it is not the retinal image that concerns us. What interests us is the concept that he wants to put 50 Campbell's soup cans on a canvas" (Marcel Duchamp, quoted in R. Crone, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, p. 22).
This statement by Marcel Duchamp, an artist whose revolutionary readymades anticipated Andy Warhol's commercial imagery, reflects the significant impact of the Campbell's Soup Can paintings. When Warhol first exhibited these paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962, he sparked an enormous controversy. In this first one-person exhibition, Warhol featured thirty-two Campbell's Soup Can paintings. Their total was determined by the number of available types of Campbell's soup in the marketplace, and the paintings were identical except for their labels which differentiated the flavors.
Warhol's choice of this subject underscores the artist's instinctive understanding of the new post-War American consumerism. As David Bourdon has explained, "Andy always zeroed in on the most familiar and instantly recognizable subjects. Just as he had chosen to paint Superman and Dick Tracy because they were headliners in their field, he decided to depict Coca Cola and Campbell's Soup" (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 90). Warhol accentuated the commercial content of these works in other exhibitions, especially in his show at the Bianchini Gallery in New York, where his installation was designed to resemble supermarket displays. These exhibitions quickly made Warhol a household name, and the Campbell's Soup Can paintings specifically propelled the artist into national stardom. Today, these images are indelibly identified with Warhol and symbolic of the Pop Art movement of the sixties.
In style and content, this imagery was cogent in its critique of previous traditions in painting. Warhol's paintings of consumer items and his seemingly mechanical style not only contested the artistic agenda and predominant style of Abstract Expressionism but also radically transformed the even longer tradition of still-life painting. As Bourdon has asserted: "Warhol's red-and-white labeled pictures signaled a cold-blooded rebellion against the centuries-old tradition of painterly still-lifes. It was as if the artist had declared that packaged foods with recognizable brand names constituted contemporary reality, abruptly leading him to clear the table of outmoded visual feasts. His paintings implied that nobody should go on mimicking Caravaggio's sensual baskets of ripened fruits, Chardin's glowing copper vessels and mounds of plush peaches, or Cézanne's dynamic arrangements of energy-rich apples . . . . High-minded admirers of belle peinture felt a chill as they gazed at or thought about Warhol's soup-can paintings, which seemed only a shade more intellectual, cosmopolitan and cultivated than a pantry shelf" (D. Bourdon, op. cit., p. 88).
Within Warhol's oeuvre, the present painting is a unique and highly significant picture. While it is certainly related to Warhol's serial images of singular soup cans, this work is even more blatant in its subversion of the still-life genre. Conventional still lifes often show harmonious arrangements of disparate objects in compositions which were carefully constructed to create striking juxtapositions of various textures, providing the artist with an opportunity to demonstrate his technical skills. Vanitas images also included symbolic details -- wilting flowers, decaying fruits or intruding insects--which were meant to allude to the inescapable passage of time. By contrast, the present painting offers only an informal arrangement of identical cans, whose unblemished packaging is rendered in flat areas of color. The work is hand painted, and traces of the artist's touch are especially clear in the inconsistencies in the patterning on the cans as well as in the areas of graphite visible across the surface.
Unlike the elaborate and balanced compositions of his predecessors, the precarious group of the cans painted by Warhol conveys an apparent informality. These cans, with their pristine surfaces, deny any specific symbolic content, which Warhol advanced more convincingly, in his images of cans with torn labels or invasive canopeners. A preparatory drawing related to the present work shows that the artist has taken another decision step in the final painting, removing all physical signs of temporality: the vigorous shadows in the preparatory sketch are present only in faintest of pencil traces. Positioned against an essentially blank surface, the cans in the present work form a most subversive revisioning of modern still life; they are iconic images of the new consumerism, paradigms of swift consumption, which were as short-lived on supermarket shelves as Warhol hoped his art would be on gallery walls.
John Coplans has stated that the "Campbell's canned soup cans--Warhol seems ironically to assert--are like people; their names, sexes, ages, origins, tastes and passions may well be different, but an advanced consumer-oriented, technological society squeezes them into the same vat . . . . Warhol dehumanizes people and humanizes soup cans" (J. Coplans, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, pp. 50, 52).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Curtain, Jug and Compotier, 1893-1894. Collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney.
(fig. 2) Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, pencil on paper. Private Collection.
(fig. 3) Supermarket exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery, from "You Think This is a Supermarket?" Life, November 20, 1964. Copyright c Henri Dauman, 1964/Dauman Pictures, New York.
(fig. 4) Warhol in preparation for his 1962 exhibition of Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery.
This statement by Marcel Duchamp, an artist whose revolutionary readymades anticipated Andy Warhol's commercial imagery, reflects the significant impact of the Campbell's Soup Can paintings. When Warhol first exhibited these paintings at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962, he sparked an enormous controversy. In this first one-person exhibition, Warhol featured thirty-two Campbell's Soup Can paintings. Their total was determined by the number of available types of Campbell's soup in the marketplace, and the paintings were identical except for their labels which differentiated the flavors.
Warhol's choice of this subject underscores the artist's instinctive understanding of the new post-War American consumerism. As David Bourdon has explained, "Andy always zeroed in on the most familiar and instantly recognizable subjects. Just as he had chosen to paint Superman and Dick Tracy because they were headliners in their field, he decided to depict Coca Cola and Campbell's Soup" (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 90). Warhol accentuated the commercial content of these works in other exhibitions, especially in his show at the Bianchini Gallery in New York, where his installation was designed to resemble supermarket displays. These exhibitions quickly made Warhol a household name, and the Campbell's Soup Can paintings specifically propelled the artist into national stardom. Today, these images are indelibly identified with Warhol and symbolic of the Pop Art movement of the sixties.
In style and content, this imagery was cogent in its critique of previous traditions in painting. Warhol's paintings of consumer items and his seemingly mechanical style not only contested the artistic agenda and predominant style of Abstract Expressionism but also radically transformed the even longer tradition of still-life painting. As Bourdon has asserted: "Warhol's red-and-white labeled pictures signaled a cold-blooded rebellion against the centuries-old tradition of painterly still-lifes. It was as if the artist had declared that packaged foods with recognizable brand names constituted contemporary reality, abruptly leading him to clear the table of outmoded visual feasts. His paintings implied that nobody should go on mimicking Caravaggio's sensual baskets of ripened fruits, Chardin's glowing copper vessels and mounds of plush peaches, or Cézanne's dynamic arrangements of energy-rich apples . . . . High-minded admirers of belle peinture felt a chill as they gazed at or thought about Warhol's soup-can paintings, which seemed only a shade more intellectual, cosmopolitan and cultivated than a pantry shelf" (D. Bourdon, op. cit., p. 88).
Within Warhol's oeuvre, the present painting is a unique and highly significant picture. While it is certainly related to Warhol's serial images of singular soup cans, this work is even more blatant in its subversion of the still-life genre. Conventional still lifes often show harmonious arrangements of disparate objects in compositions which were carefully constructed to create striking juxtapositions of various textures, providing the artist with an opportunity to demonstrate his technical skills. Vanitas images also included symbolic details -- wilting flowers, decaying fruits or intruding insects--which were meant to allude to the inescapable passage of time. By contrast, the present painting offers only an informal arrangement of identical cans, whose unblemished packaging is rendered in flat areas of color. The work is hand painted, and traces of the artist's touch are especially clear in the inconsistencies in the patterning on the cans as well as in the areas of graphite visible across the surface.
Unlike the elaborate and balanced compositions of his predecessors, the precarious group of the cans painted by Warhol conveys an apparent informality. These cans, with their pristine surfaces, deny any specific symbolic content, which Warhol advanced more convincingly, in his images of cans with torn labels or invasive canopeners. A preparatory drawing related to the present work shows that the artist has taken another decision step in the final painting, removing all physical signs of temporality: the vigorous shadows in the preparatory sketch are present only in faintest of pencil traces. Positioned against an essentially blank surface, the cans in the present work form a most subversive revisioning of modern still life; they are iconic images of the new consumerism, paradigms of swift consumption, which were as short-lived on supermarket shelves as Warhol hoped his art would be on gallery walls.
John Coplans has stated that the "Campbell's canned soup cans--Warhol seems ironically to assert--are like people; their names, sexes, ages, origins, tastes and passions may well be different, but an advanced consumer-oriented, technological society squeezes them into the same vat . . . . Warhol dehumanizes people and humanizes soup cans" (J. Coplans, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, pp. 50, 52).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Curtain, Jug and Compotier, 1893-1894. Collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney.
(fig. 2) Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962, pencil on paper. Private Collection.
(fig. 3) Supermarket exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery, from "You Think This is a Supermarket?" Life, November 20, 1964. Copyright c Henri Dauman, 1964/Dauman Pictures, New York.
(fig. 4) Warhol in preparation for his 1962 exhibition of Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery.