Campbell's Soup Cans

Lore & Background

Andy Warhol moved to New York City in 1949 after studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and quickly found success as a commercial illustrator. By 1961, Warhol began producing canvases based on comic strips and newspaper advertisements. Having been rejected by the Leo Castelli Gallery for similarities in his work to the style of comics done by Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol was seeking a distinct direction within the emerging Pop art movement. He turned to everyday commercial imagery such as Campbell's soup cans, dollar bills, and Coca-Cola bottles.

In late 1961, Warhol began working on Campbell's Soup Cans at his home studio at 1342 Lexington Avenue in New York. The series consisted of 32 hand-painted canvases, each depicting a different variety of Campbell's soup. They were based on photographs taken by his former boyfriend Edward Wallowitch. Contrary to later confusion, the works were not silkscreens but traced and painted canvases incorporating stamped details. Warhol used a rubber stamp to apply the gold fleur-de-lis near the lower portion of each image and worked with commercial-grade acrylic paint rather than the oil paint more typical of fine art.

When art dealer Irving Blum visited Warhol's studio in May 1962, Warhol was working on his sixteenth soup can painting. Blum offered him an exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition opened July 9, 1962, with the paintings displayed in a single row on narrow ledges, like grocery items on a shelf. Only five or six paintings were sold initially. Blum then contacted the buyers and asked them to relinquish their purchases, enabling him to acquire the complete set himself for $1,000, paid in ten monthly installments of $100.

Reader's Guide

The Campbell's Soup Cans series is widely regarded as a canonical symbol of Pop art and one of the most influential bodies of art of the 20th century. Drawing on his background as a commercial illustrator, Warhol focused on the packaging of everyday items, making high art of the artistic depiction of the commercial packaging rather than of the everyday items themselves, prompting initial controversy but eventual acclaim. The series challenged traditional distinctions between fine art and commercial imagery, and contributed to critical discourse about originality, reproduction, and the meaning of art in a consumer society. The original 32 canvases were preserved by art dealer Irving Blum and later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. The series has maintained a lasting presence in popular culture, inspiring derivative works by other artists and achieving multimillion-dollar results in the art market. The later sets of screen prints are sometimes confused with the original 1962 series, and unauthorized prints have also circulated.

Did You Know?

• The 32 canvases were hand-painted, not silkscreened, and used a rubber stamp for the gold fleur-de-lis.
• Art dealer Irving Blum bought the complete set for $1,000, paid in ten monthly installments of $100.
• The exhibition opened July 9, 1962, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, with the paintings displayed on narrow ledges like grocery items.
• Actor Dennis Hopper reserved Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) before the opening but later relinquished it so the set could stay together.

From Commercial Illustration to Pop Art Breakthrough

Andy Warhol arrived in New York in 1949 fresh from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he had developed his distinctive blotted-line method of tracing images and blotting wet ink to produce irregular, hand-drawn contours. He quickly established himself as a commercial illustrator, landing his first published drawing in Glamour magazine that very year, and by the early 1950s he was exhibiting at venues like the Bodley Gallery and even the Museum of Modern Art. By 1961, however, Warhol found himself creatively boxed in. His comic-strip canvases, which he had used as a backdrop for a Bonwit Teller window display that spring, drew a rejection from the Leo Castelli Gallery on the grounds that they resembled Roy Lichtenstein's work too closely. Warhol himself acknowledged the problem, stating he needed to produce something different enough from Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist that would feel genuinely personal. That search led him toward the unglamorous packaging of everyday consumer goods—Campbell's soup cans, dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles—and set the stage for the series that would redefine his career.

Hand-Painted in a Lexington Avenue Studio

Although Warhol would later become famous for his silkscreen workshop, the original thirty-two Campbell's Soup Cans were in fact painted largely by hand, making them among the last works he produced in that labor-intensive manner. Working from his home studio at 1342 Lexington Avenue in late 1961, he based each canvas on photographs taken by his former partner Edward Wallowitch, tracing the can images and filling them in with commercial-grade acrylic paint rather than the oil medium more typical of fine-art practice. A small rubber stamp applied the gold fleur-de-lis motif near the bottom of each label. Between November 1961 and mid-1962, Warhol produced roughly fifty soup-can canvases, the definitive set of thirty-two among them, completed by June 1962. The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné also records three ambitious grid paintings—one showing two hundred cans and two showing one hundred—alongside numerous related still-life studies. Crucially, these were not the silkscreen reproductions that would dominate his later output; they were individual, hand-finished objects, each one a distinct painting of a distinct soup variety in a uniform twenty-by-sixteen-inch format.

The Ferus Gallery and a New Kind of Fame

In May 1962, art dealer Irving Blum walked into Warhol's studio and found him still working on his sixteenth soup-can painting, with no gallery representation to his name. Blum was struck enough to offer Warhol a show at his Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. By June, the thirty-two finished canvases had been shipped to Blum, and the exhibition opened in July 1962, presenting the uniform grid of soup labels to a West Coast audience with little exposure to the emerging Pop art movement. The timing could not have been better: a May 11 Time magazine profile, the Slice-of-Cake School, had already introduced Warhol to a national readership, quoting him saying he simply painted things you use every day and never think about. Critics like David Bourdon had visited the studio as early as March. The Ferus show challenged a long-standing boundary between fine art and commercial packaging, and the controversy it sparked, followed by critical acclaim, catapulted Warhol into the national spotlight and made his name inseparable from the very cans he had depicted.

A Canonical Legacy and a Market Phenomenon

The Campbell's Soup Cans have endured as perhaps the single most recognizable emblem of Pop art and one of the most influential bodies of work of the twentieth century. Warhol's association with the subject became so total that his name and the Campbell's brand are now virtually interchangeable in popular memory. The series also spawned a long afterlife: roughly twenty additional similar paintings in the early 1960s, a 1965 set of twenty larger multi-colored canvases, numerous drawings, sketches, and stencils produced over the years, and two editions of two-hundred-fifty ten-print screen-print portfolios issued in 1968 and 1969. The original thirty-two canvases were preserved by Irving Blum and ultimately acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. Yet the legacy is complicated by confusion—later screen prints are often mistaken for the 1962 originals, and unauthorized reproductions have circulated widely. Despite this, the series continues to inspire derivative works by other artists, commands multimillion-dollar prices at auction, and keeps alive the critical conversation about originality, mechanical reproduction, and the meaning of art in a consumer-driven culture.

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