CAMPBELL'S SOUP CANS
ANDY WARHOL, 1962
Thirty-two cans of soup. You knew this one before you ever got in the building. The one about mass production. Everything identical. Nothing personal. Art you could order by the case. Okay. Pick a can. Doesn't matter which one. Walk right up to it. They're hand-painted. All thirty-two. Warhol drew the cans in pencil, projected the lettering onto the canvas and traced it. Those little gold fleur-de-lis along the bottom? Stamped on by hand. And once you're this close, the machine starts falling apart. Letters lean. Stamps come out uneven. Rims wobble. Now find the Cheddar Cheese. One can out of thirty-two got a little yellow banner. "New! Great as a sauce, too!" He even painted the ad. Warhol spent all this time making thirty-two paintings by hand that looked like nobody had touched them. Not long after this, he starts using silkscreen. Much easier. Apparently thirty-two was enough. So, why soup? His answer was basically: he liked soup. "I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years." Same thing. Over and over. Which, yeah. That tracks. People have been explaining this painting ever since. That was his explanation. July 1962. Los Angeles. His first solo painting show. The cans went around the room in a row, sitting on a little shelf. The gallery owner, Irving Blum, explained the shelf pretty simply: "Cans sit on shelves." Then a gallery down the street stacked actual Campbell's cans in its window. DO NOT BE MISLED. GET THE ORIGINAL. Two for 33 cents. Five paintings sold. Dennis Hopper bought one. Then Blum looked at the wall and decided the whole thing should stay together. So he called everybody back. Even Hopper. Got the paintings back and bought all thirty-two from Warhol himself. A thousand dollars. Paid in installments. That set is this wall. Count them.