Thirty-two soup cans on grocery ledges remade Pop art
Between 1961 and 1962 Andy Warhol painted thirty-two Campbell’s soup varieties on identical twenty-by-sixteen-inch canvases. Shown in July 1962 at Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery like shelf stock, they collapsed fine art and commercial packaging—and made Warhol’s name inseparable from the can.
Warhol, trained at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, reached New York in 1949 and published in Glamour that year as a commercial illustrator, refining a “blotted line” transfer. By 1961 he was painting comics and ads, even staging them in a Bonwit Teller window, yet Leo Castelli passed him for looking too much like Roy Lichtenstein. Seeking a Pop signature, he shifted from drip abstraction toward acrylic seriality, learning silkscreen later from Floriano Vecchi while still finishing the soup set by hand.
At 1342 Lexington Avenue he traced photographs by Edward Wallowitch and stamped gold fleur-de-lis details—hand-painted, not silkscreened, despite later myth. Roughly fifty soup canvases appeared between November 1961 and mid-1962; the definitive thirty-two were done by June, alongside grids of 200 and 100 cans. Time’s 11 May 1962 “Slice-of-Cake School” piece quoted him painting everyday beauty. Dealer Irving Blum received the set in June; the Ferus show opened 9 July without Warhol, canvases in a single grocery-like row on narrow ledges.
Only five or six sold—Dennis Hopper reserved Tomato before opening—until Blum persuaded buyers including Hopper to return works so the thirty-two could stay together. The show closed 4 August 1962, the day Marilyn Monroe died; Warhol soon silkscreened her face, then Elvis and Elizabeth Taylor at Ferus in October 1963. Martha Jackson canceled a planned December 1962 show citing “very bad repercussions,” though she kept some paintings. August already saw a museum debut at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum; October’s New Realists show at Sidney Janis placed soup canvases beside Lichtenstein and peers. Later screen-print editions and fakes blur the 1962 originals, yet the series remains a Pop canon selling for millions.
Source: Campbell's Soup Cans
