Campbell's Soup Cans

1962

Date: July 9, 1962 · Place: Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, California · Figures: Andy Warhol, painter · Irving Blum, Ferus Gallery dealer · Walter Hopps, co-founder of Ferus · Tags: Art, Replication, PopArt 01. Thirty-Two Cans on a Shelf Warhol's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles opens July 9, 1962, at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery. Thirty-two canvases, one per Campbell's Soup variety then sold, each 20 by 16 inches, lined up on a narrow white shelf like supermarket inventory. Five paintings sell at one hundred dollars each. Blum buys them back and reassembles the set for himself. The form is the argument. A meme is a thing identical to its neighbors that nevertheless asks to be looked at. Warhol stages exactly that condition and dares the room to find difference. 02. From Painting to Silkscreen By August 1962 Warhol drops hand-painted execution for photo-silkscreen. Marilyn, Elvis, Liz, electric chairs, car crashes, dollar bills now come off the Factory wall in editions of dozens, sometimes hundreds. The medium is replication itself. The artist's labor is the choice of source image and the tolerance for misregistration. Warhol describes the goal as becoming a machine. He is also describing the function of a meme. "I want to be a machine." — Andy Warhol to G. R. Swenson, ARTnews, November 1963 03. Template for the Reproducible Image Every later image macro, reaction-image grid, and four-panel meme template inherits Warhol's premise: meaning lives in the variation across a repeated frame, not in any single instance. The Campbell's grid is a 1962 proof that the public will pay attention to a thing precisely because there are thirty-two of it. Blum's reassembled set sells to MoMA in 1996 for fifteen million dollars. The grid is now hung exactly as Ferus showed it. Sources • Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (Harcourt, 1980) • Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (MoMA, 1990) • G. R. Swenson, 'What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,' ARTnews, November 1963 • Roberta Smith, 'Warhol's Soup Cans, As You've Never Seen Them,' The New York Times, April 25, 2015