Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans

Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans turned a supermarket staple into one of the defining works of Pop Art. In this video, Kylee Aragon explores the series' origins, its rocky 1962 debut, and how it came to define Warhol's career.

In 1962, 32 paintings, one for each variety then sold by Campbell's, were arranged side by side on narrow shelves at LA's Ferus Gallery. The installation was reportedly there just to keep the canvases level, but it turned the works into something closer to a supermarket display than a row of paintings. As Warhol put it himself, "Cans sit on shelves. Why not?"

Kylee looks at why Warhol chose Campbell's Soup, from his claim that he'd eaten it for lunch every day for twenty years to the account that friend Muriel Latow steered him towards it after Roy Lichtenstein got to comic books first. We also examine how the first 32 canvases were made entirely by hand, painstakingly recreating Campbell's packaging months before Warhol adopted the silkscreen process that would come to define his career.

The exhibition itself was no immediate success. One critic called Warhol "a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan," and a rival gallery displayed real soup cans at two for 33 cents. Only a handful of paintings sold, including one to Dennis Hopper, before Ferus owner Irving Blum bought them back, kept the set of 32 together, and eventually sold it to MoMA in 1996.

Warhol returned to the subject throughout his career, from the 1968 and 1969 screenprint portfolios to later appearances in his Reversals and Retrospectives. More than sixty years on, Campbell's Soup Cans remains the clearest expression of Warhol's belief that mass production was its own kind of democracy, and it anticipated the fascination with brands that still shapes culture today.