CAMPBELL'S SOUP CANS
ANDY WARHOL, 1962
Soup. Just soup. Thirty-two canvases. Each one a single can of Campbell's. Thirty-two, because that's how many varieties Campbell's made in 1962. Tomato. Chicken Noodle. Cream of Mushroom. Go along the rows — every label is different. He painted every single one. Lean in close. These are hand-painted. Before Warhol discovered silkscreen, he stenciled them with a projector and a brush. Look for the small human errors — a smudged letter, a wobbly rim, a medallion that's a touch off-center. Each can has its own fingerprint. Everybody else in New York is trying to wring something big out of themselves. Abstract expressionism is still the church. Paint flung at the canvas like a confession. Meanwhile Warhol is working late in his mother's apartment, painting cans of soup. Here's the thing. He meant it. He actually ate this stuff. Same lunch, every day, for twenty years. Years later, in an interview, he just shrugs: "I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, I guess, the same thing over and over again." That's the key. People still want this painting to be a joke. Like he's making fun of you for buying soup. He wasn't. He was a recorder. He looked at American life — the stuff people actually had in their kitchens — and decided it deserved a portrait. Painted the way you'd paint a saint. When these first showed — at the Ferus Gallery in L.A., summer of '62 — they were lined up on a narrow shelf running around the whole room. Like a grocery aisle. The gallery next door stacked real Campbell's cans in its window with a sign: "Don't be misled. Get the real thing. 29 cents." Most people took the whole exhibit as a prank. It was also Warhol's first solo show. A few of the canvases sold before Irving Blum, the gallery's owner, figured out what he had on his hands. He called the buyers back, bought the cans back out of them, and kept the set together. Which is why you're looking at all thirty-two of them right now. The wall is a shelf. You're doing the small thing you do all day — staring at rows of identical cans and picking one. So — why is this painting famous? It's a painting of soup. Here's what Warhol said a couple of years later, about a Coca-Cola: "A Coke is a Coke. No amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. Liz Taylor knows it. The President knows it. The bum knows it." The cans are the same point. In 1962, a country that couldn't agree on anything could agree that Campbell's Tomato tasted the same in the White House as in a trailer park. That was the one honest portrait of America anyone had bothered to paint. Sixty-four years later, nobody's painted a better one.