SOUP CAN

The nature of Warhol’s legacy is spelled out in Gary Indiana’s pithy account, focusing on the artist’s enduring masterpieces, the “Campbell’s Soup Can” paintings, which rocked an unsuspecting art world in the summer of 1962. Their appearance at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, ranged evenly as in a supermarket, drew more ridicule than praise. A nearby gallery filled its windows with Campbell’s soup and offered “the real thing for only 33 cents a can”. Far from distressed, Warhol joined in the fun. He took a photographer to the supermarket and had his picture taken signing the cans. The photograph was wired round the world. For Indiana, the “Soup Can” series “condensed, like canned soup, what pop art had been seeking. It reflected the unanticipated effects of technological changes on the ways Americans lived after the second world war – changes in mores and values created by accelerated consumerism”. The “Soup Cans” were stinging rebukes on the dull conformism of the previous decade. They were “works of obdurate stupidity radiating the aptness of genius”. At the centre of their creation was the enigmatic cool of their creator. Warhol’s personality, vapid, ironic, passive, was as strong a statement of his time as his works. You had to search hard but there was even an element of personal biography in his pioneering work: Warhol had had to eat Campbell’s soup for lunch every day “throughout 20 years of grinding poverty”, and was taking obscure revenge on the innocent foodstuff.

-Financial Times
march 12 2010