Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato)

Medium: Screenprint on Mowhawk Superfine paper
Year: circa 1978
Image: 29 5/8 x 17 1/4 inches (75.2 x 43.8 cm)
Sheet: 45 1/8 x 35 1/8 inches (114.6  x 89.2 cm)
Edition: A small number of impressions
Printer: Rupert Jasen Smith, New-York
Literature: Feldman and Schellmann IIIA.5

Unpublished print.
Created at approximately the same time as the 1979-80 Reversal series of paintings.

A rare, unpublished proof of Warhol’s most instantly-recognizable image, Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) was a personal project of the artist created at approximately the same time as his Reversal series of paintings. The unique print, which was produced in a limited number of impressions, reflects the wide scope of Warhol’s creativity and experimentation in his printmaking process as he explored color and compositional variations during proofing.

“I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.”

Andy Warhol engaged with art in a radically unembellished way, whilst simultaneously endowing modern art history with a newfound complexity. This surprising simplicity, unburdened by traditional understandings of ‘high art’ and instead informed directly by the pedestrian everyday, is perhaps best exemplified in the Campbell’s Soup screenprints. Anecdotal, autobiographical, abundant and appreciable, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can is a twentieth century icon. Born out of American consumerism of the 1960s, its various iterations have attained an unparalleled degree of recognition, having been produced millions of times in media, supermarkets, and in art. Radically unembellished, the soup cans demonstrate the virtuosity, wit and irreverence that characterizes Warhol’s artistic vision and the essence of Pop.

In the spring of 1962, after seeing Roy Lichtenstein’s exhibition of comic-strip paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery, Warhol solicited advice from friends for new subjects to paint. Campbell’s soup was suggested as something that everybody recognizes and, in a flash of inspiration, Warhol bought cans of soup and began tracing projections of them. The stencil that would go on to form his iconic Soup Can compositions was made by projecting a photograph taken by Warhol’s close companion, the photographer Edward Wallowitch. Taking the directness of photography and melding it with fine art, Warhol harnessed the straight-edge, undeviating nature of mechanical photo-reproduction to make his Soup Cans appear as plain and impersonal as possible.

“Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second – comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles – all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” 

In creating his Soup Can works, the medium of screenprint enabled Warhol to use repetitive forms more quickly and effectively – a method coincidentally used in the production of food packaging. The process completely refrains from spontaneity and removes artistic intervention, abandoning the role of artist as author. Warhol built on the radical principles of Marcel Duchamp, who in turn challenged the critical apparatus of “high art” with his readymades. Elevating the inconspicuous every day to something as worthy as other post-war American subjects, Warhol presented his Soup Cans hundreds at a time. Their uninterrupted uniformity, lined up together like soldiers, battled the ideology of Abstract Expressionists who leant into pre-lingual gesturalism channeled directly from the artist’s psyche.

“If you take a Campbell Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell Soup cans on a canvas.”
—Marcel Duchamp 

Through his soup can subject matter Warhol radically altered fine art, challenging its fundamental nature and status. He departed from the seriousness of his recent artistic predecessors, transforming something trivial into an emblem of American consumerism. Whether an appropriator, a genius, a copyist or simply a label maker, Warhol delved into the trenches of pop culture and emerged not only as a cult figure himself, but also having created an icon whose recognizable form continues to permeate twenty-first century culture.

Auction Results

Phillips New-York: 26 October 2023
Estimated: USD 30,000 – 50,000
USD 69,850