Tomato Soup
15 1/4 x 14 7/8 inchesCampbell's Tomato Soup Can, 1968
paper: 15 1/4 x 14 7/8 inches
image: 15 1/4 x 10 inches
frame: 25 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches
edition of unknown size
(estimated at fewer than 300)
unsigned as published
stamped verso "screenprint from Banner by Andy Warhol © for Multiples Inc. 1968"
printed by Edition Domberger, Germany
published by Multiples, Inc., New York
Provenance
Multiples Inc., New York
Private Collection, New York
Literature
Frayda Feldman and Jorg Schellmann, Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne: 1962-1987, Fourth Edition, D.A.P., New York, 2003, see Catalogue Reference F&S II. 44-53, page 213 regarding Campbell's Tomato Soup Banner. Warhol also created this image as a colored felt banner, in 1965, co-published by the Betsy Ross Flag and Banner Co., Inc. and Multiples, Inc., New York
Andy Warhol, in what began as a commission for the Campbell Soup Company in 1964, created this series of ‘portraits’ of an everyday item, the tomato soup label emblazoned with day-glo colors onto canvas, which soon became irrefutable symbols of the Pop Art movement. His simple technique, using the same silk screening method he mastered in the Flowers series which precedes the Colored Campbell’s Soup Cans, secured for Warhol, more than any other image of his creation, the preeminent post held throughout his career as a generation’s taste-maker and the American avant-garde artist.
ANDY WARHOL CAMPBELL’S TOMATO SOUP CAN
Why did you start painting soup cans?
"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. I used to want to live at the Waldorf Towers and have soup and a sandwich, like that scene in the restaurant in Naked Lunch." (Andy Warhol interviewed by G. Swanson, "What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters (Part I)", Art News, New York, November, 1963).
Andy Warhol, in what began as a commission for the Campbell Soup Company in 1964, created this series of ‘portraits’ of an everyday item, the tomato soup label emblazoned with day-glo colors onto canvas, which soon became irrefutable symbols of the Pop Art movement. His simple technique, using the same silk screening method he mastered in the Flowers series which precedes the Colored Campbell’s Soup Cans, secured for Warhol, more than any other image of his creation, the preeminent post held throughout his career as a generation’s taste-maker and the American avant-garde artist. Further, it would be this technique which would characterize Warhol’s artistic oeuvre for the rest of his career, foreshadowing his extremely iconic imagery that followed.
Through statements made by Warhol at the time, we know that his pivotal concern in the production of the Soup Cans was the routine process through which the silk screening evolved. Having just moved his studio into a much larger space on 47th Street, known colloquially as The Factory, Warhol’s works in 1965 signify the transition his artwork took as a result of the new studio space.
In essence, The Factory which most often conjures imagery of Warhol’s social status and exuberant personality, was in actuality also a literal model of the American factory. The production of the Campbell’s Soup Cans, overseen by Warhol, was done with a deliberately industrial, machine-like methodology, the artist acknowledging the consumerist, commercial appeal to not only the symbol of the soup can he portrays but also to how his representation of it was fabricated from the very beginning. For the artist, the principle ingredient in his process was the very essence of mass-production. He was the designer, choosing paint colors and application, but the scale of mass production appealed to him as it served an appropriate metaphor to the subject he chose.
Sotheby's, New York
In an interview in 1963 Warhol explains how the materiality appealed to him as it manifests itself within the scope and aim of Pop Art. When asked if Pop Art is a fad, he responds: "Yes, it’s a fad, but I don’t see what difference it makes. I just heard a rumor that G. quit working, that’s she’s given up art altogether. And everyone is saying how awful it is that A. gave up his style and is doing it in a different way. I don’t think so at all. If an artist can’t do any more, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year or two from now—I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that’s what’s going to happen, that’s going to be the whole new scene. That’s probably one reason I’m using silk screens now. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me. I haven’t been able to make every image clear and simple and the same as the first one. I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s. (…) The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do." (Andy Warhol interviewed by G. Swanson, "What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters (Part I)", Art News, New York, November, 1963).
For Warhol, this method neither detracted nor added to the allure of the artwork; rather, the production process itself enabled the artist to articulate his theories towards his unique approach to the artistic scene and served to provide a metaphoric end quotation to the generation of Abstract Expressionists who Warhol very ardently referenced, most typically trying to distinguish himself from it.
Warhol’s process of creation in painting the Cambell’s Soup Cans was also inventive because the artist incorporated day-glo, imaginative colors into his canvases. With what began in the Flowers, Warhol elaborated with for the soup cans. Rather than simply add white to paint supplied to diversify his color palette, Warhol instead incorporated blending and for the first time used a much wider range of colors. It would be these "fauve" colors, in the end, that revolutionized Warhol’s approach to the tried and true subject.
At its height in late 1965 and early 1966, the Factory hovered in time with a magical presence infused in the air. As one factory legion describes, "At that point in my life, in everybody’s life, that was the culmination of the Sixties. What a year. Oh, it was splendid. Everything was gold, everything. Every color was gold. It was just fabulous. It was complete freedom. Any time I went to the Factory, it was the right time. Any time I went home, it was right. Everybody was together; it was the end of an era. That was the end of the amphetamine scene; it was the last time amphetamine really was good. And we used it. We really played it." (S. Koch, "The Once-Whirling Other", Saturday Review World, September 25, 1973, p. 23).
By selecting the Campbell’s label as his subject matter, Warhol manufactures an already highly commercialized symbol of commodity. Their popular identity is intrinsically linked to the artist’s larger pursuit and also label the importance of the Factory which served as backdrop to their production, providing the fuel to their fire. More importantly, however, Warhol strove through his Colored Campbell’s Soup Cans to identify a clear vision of art’s aim in the mid 1960s, as America’s protagonists and above all Andy Warhol, served a consequential new role on the international scene in guiding the direction of contemporary art.
