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Lot Essay
“From almost the start of his career, Andy Warhol cast a very broad shadow over the art world…he made art the province of all manner of prosaic themes and sources; he put photography, appropriation, and serial composition at the center of his methodology; and he gave permission to do virtually anything in the name of art. By his example, the premise and practice or art-making were dramatically transformed”—Mark Rosenthal
(M. Rosenthal, “Dialogues with Warhol,” in M. Rosenthal, M. Prather, I. Alteveer & R. Lowery, Regarding Warhol, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012, p. 11).
In 1962, when asked to explain the striking new form of art that he championed, Andy Warhol told Greg Swenson of Art News that the inspiration for his new Pop paintings came from the explosion in popular culture and commercialism that America had witnessed following World War II. “The reason I’m painting this way,” he said “is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do, and do machine-like, is what I want to do” (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Swenson, "What is Pop Art?—Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1", Art News November 1962). Yet despite his championing of this new machine-like aesthetic, the traces of Warhol’s artistic hand can be seen throughout his work as he continuously and comprehensively strived to find new ways and processes to make his truly revolutionary form of art.
Eschewing the traditional study of studio art, as a student Warhol opted to follow a course in commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in his native Pittsburgh. After graduating in 1949 with a degree in Pictorial Design, Warhol moved to New York where he embarked on a lucrative career in magazine illustration and advertising. It was while developing a highly regarded reputation in this field that he first began to engage popular culture with fine art. Among his earliest works was Advertisement, 1961 (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Collection Marx, Berlin) in which Warhol paints a partly rendered Pepsi-Cola ad alongside images he sourced from the newspaper classifieds. Although mimicking the crisp, clean lines of the mass-produced advertisements, these earliest work do not shun completely signs of the artist’s hand as works such as Wigs, Make Him Want You (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) and Popeye, 1961 all possess the painterly drips and areas of active mark-making that had characterized the preceding Abstract Expressionist movement, something which would remain present throughout his career.
The hand-painted quality is also present in what is, perhaps, his most famous series of paintings and the ones which launched him to worldwide fame—his Campbell’s Soup Cans. Painted in 1962, 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (Museum of Modern Art, New York) is based on an illustration of the ubiquitous foodstuff taken from the stationary of the Campbell’s Soup Company. Warhol cut the source image from an envelope, removed the identifying “Tomato” moniker and then projected the image onto a canvas, inserting a hand-drawn label into the template for each of the different varieties. Each one was then hand painted, with some elements of the design—primarily the fleur-de-lis—applied individually, in this case probably using a carved rubber gum erasure as a stamp. Subsequent examples from his Campbell’s Soup Cans series were either hand painted, screen-printed or produced using acrylic spray paint. This medium was probably used because it allowed Warhol to proceed more quickly and with greater ease, especially in areas of delicate detail. It also allowed the delicate stencils to last longer as they were not subject to damage that was often caused by excessive pressure used in the screening process.
Even though some of his earliest soup can works were hand-painted they were among the first of Warhol’s paintings to closely mimic the mechanical printing process, not only in terms of their aesthetic qualities but also in terms of their seriality. He perfected his silkscreen technique with his Dollar Bills painted early in 1962, he embarked on a technique which would change the course of the art historical canon. “I started [silkscreening] when I was printing money,” Warhol admitted, “I had to draw it, and it came out looking too much like a drawing, so I thought wouldn’t it be a great idea to have it printed. Somebody said you could just put it on silkscreens. So when I went down to the silkscreener I just found out that you could reproduce photographs… I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something” (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Frei and N. Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, Vol. 1, New York, 2002, p. 131).
This use of photographs as source images became most apparent in his iconic paintings of Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Like much of the world, Warhol watched the events surrounding the President’s assassination unfold on television. Working from his home at 1342 Lexington Avenue in New York on November 22 1963, Warhol and Gerald Malanga were silkscreening The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) when news of Kennedy's association broke. In the following days Warhol scoured newspapers and magazines for portraits of the First Lady and eventually selected eight, which he then cropped to produce his desired aesthetic. He then ordered a screen to be made for each of the images, enlarging each to a finished size of 20 x 16 inches. Warhol then prepared a roll of primed linen and printed each impression by hand.
Works which used photographs as their source image would become central to Warhol’s oeuvre and resulted in some of the most iconic paintings of his career. His portraits of Kennedy, alongside Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley came to symbolize the highpoint of his career and made Warhol a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. However, even within his mechanically inspired aesthetic Warhol was still keen to integrate the notion of chance and even embrace it. Although intended to give uniform impressions time after time, the silkscreen process did succumb to the variances of human involvement. Thus, dependent on individual characteristics of the screen, the amount of inky residue remaining after each pass and the differing amounts of pressure used to make each impression, works from the same series made using the same screen can be remarkably different. His portraits of the Jackie Kennedy provided a particularly good illustration of this. The ghostly margins that are the result of the idiosyncratic screenprinting process only adds to the haunting nature of the image and reminds the viewer of the fleeting nature of life and how it can disappear without warning.
Far from balking at this phenomenon, Warhol embraced it. “In August `62 I started doing silkscreens,” he said. “The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect. With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, but slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face – the first Marilyns” (A. Warhol as quoted in A. Warhol & P. Hackett, Popism, 1980, New York, p. 28).
The sense of spontaneity and risk, where no two canvases are exactly the same, is what sparked Warhol’s enthusiasm for this method of image making, along with the fact that it enabled him to harvest the mass of media images as his source material. Although often regarded as being the antithesis of so-called ‘action painting’ Warhol felt the silkscreen process alluded to a similar artistic language to the generation of Abstract Expression expressionist painters that preceded him. For Warhol the gestural nature and energy need to force the ink through the screen replicated the energetic methods of Pollock’s drips and de Kooning’s brushstrokes.
Following his early success, Warhol succumbed to producing a series of lucrative society portraits, using his unique aesthetic to produce commissioned paintings of the rich, famous and not so famous. It was only in the late 1970s and 1980s that he began to reintroduce visible signs of the artist’s hand to his work. Beginning with his portraits of Chairman Mao, he introduced a series of dramatic painterly gestures into what had previously been flat, monochromatic paintings. Warhol’s former assistant, Vincent Fremont, described the painterly nature of the artist’s method. “On the afternoon of December 7, 1972 Andy started to paint the background of a giant Mao painting… The large canvas was lying on the floor, the tall white doors that divided up the loft were open… Andy started to paint… Dipping into plastic buckets and jars of paint, there was no hesitation in his brushstrokes or his hand as he applied different colored paints in layers to the canvas” (V. Fremont, quoted by N. Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, Vol. 3, New York, 2010, p. 174).
Warhol’s background as a trained illustrator remained important to him throughout his life. Although he used pre-existing source imagery for much of his work, later in life he would return to a hand-drawn motif for one of his last great series his paintings, his Dollar Signs. Ironically, considering the endemic nature of the dollar, Warhol found that he was unable to find a pre-existing image of a dollar sign that had quite the visual impact he needed and he resorted to the skill that supported him during the early years of his career, his draughtsmanship, and drew dollar after dollar, some straight upright, some slanting, some thick, some thin, some more Pop, some more staid. The fact that the source image was one that Warhol created himself mark his Dollar Sign paintings out as a rarity within his body of work.
Although on the surface he appeared to eschew process, instead adopting the visual aesthetic of mass communication, his continuously evolving career ensured that he became one of the most inventive and innovative artists of his generation. His work encapsulates his most important ideas about fame, consumerism and popular culture and turns ubiquitous objects into images that are intensely personal portraits of the world he saw around him. More than half a century after their creation they remain enduring icons of American culture and a lasting symbols of the importance and impact of Andy Warhol’s art.
“Your Soup Can changed this country!”—Actress Ruth Warwick to Andy Warhol at the premiere of The Act with Liza Minnelli, quoted by A. Warhol & P. Hackett (ed.), The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York, 1989, p. 83).
There are perhaps few images that have come to symbolize the America dream more than a humble can of Campbell's Tomato Soup. The product has remained essentially the same in its formula and design since the early 1900s and has been a staple of American pantries for almost as long. A sign of American efficiency, ingenuity, democracy (the President eats the same Campbell’s soup as everybody else) and the growth of consumer culture, this ubiquitous product became one of the most pertinent symbols of the American postwar economic miracle. But it was Andy Warhol’s series of soup can paintings that probably did the most to engrain the image of the product on the American psyche. His 1962 iconic work 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (Museum of Modern Art, New York) became the cornerstone of the bourgeoning Pop art movement and would propel their creator to international fame and fortune. In addition, the Campbell's Soup cans became the perfect prototype for the myriad of other subjects, including celebrities, socialites, catastrophes, and other consumer products, that followed it and continued his mining of popular visual culture. The constancy of the Campbell's Soup can design was the perfect vehicle to explore the American desire for an easily definable identity. Seared into the popular consciousness, the continuity provided by Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can implies a sense of belonging and security as the idolization of movie stars provides a glorified sense of the American-type. Warhol's serial images perfectly reflect the inherent repetition of a consumer driven society.
In a 1963 interview, when asked why he chose something as ubiquitous as a can of soup as his subject, Warhol explained in his deadpan manner, "Because 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. Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea" (A. Warhol, quoted in I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, p. 18). With his soup can paintings he immortalized the Campbell's trademark, which was a turning point in the history of Pop art, leading to the product to become synonymous with Warhol himself.
Campbell’s Soup Can and Five Campbell’s Soup Cans were both painted in 1962 at what proved to be a turning point in Warhol’s career. As Kirk Varnedoe recounts in his 1971 essay "Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962," the gallery owner Irving Blum, during one of his yearly trips to New York to scout new talent, made his first visit to Warhol's studio. Not compelled by the brushy, crude imagery of Warhol's earlier works of superheroes and advertisements, Blum was confounded by this initial encounter. Luck would intervene on Warhol's behalf though and Blum had an unscheduled return to New York at the end of the year. Blum was once again urged to visit the young quirky artist. Entering the studio this time, Blum was confronted by the austere frontal portraits of Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans. Upon seeing these new paintings, Blum immediately offered Warhol a single-man show and the groundbreaking exhibition of Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in July of 1962 was born. The reverberations were enormous. The Ferus show established Warhol as one of the premier Pop artists. As Varnedoe writes, "After the 1962 show, the Campbell's Soup Can swiftly became something like Warhol's own house brand, a logo for everything that was outrageous about him. Along with enlarged comic-book Ben Day dots, it is now something of a visual sound bite for all Pop art, if not for a whole post-1960 attitude of hip irony" (K. Varnedoe, "Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962," Andy Warhol Retrospective, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2001, p. 44).
The rendering of his Campbell's Soup cans demonstrates that his desire to achieve the objective precision of mechanical reproduction is already in evidence. Warhol, with his finely tuned graphic designer's eye, knew that replicating the unadulterated red coloration and bold black lettering of the original design against a dramatically stark white background, would pack both a strong visual and conceptual punch, sending ripples through the art world that still reverberate today. Later in life Warhol reflected that it the Campbell's soup cans were among his favorite pictures. "I should have just done the Campbell’s Soups and kept on doing them ... well, because everybody only does one painting anyway" (A. Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol, (ed.) A. Michelson et. al., 2001 p. 124). Visually striking and highly memorable, they are iconic images of burgeoning consumer culture, and a characteristically savvy reflection of contemporary society and Warhol’s wider oeuvre.
(M. Rosenthal, “Dialogues with Warhol,” in M. Rosenthal, M. Prather, I. Alteveer & R. Lowery, Regarding Warhol, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012, p. 11).
In 1962, when asked to explain the striking new form of art that he championed, Andy Warhol told Greg Swenson of Art News that the inspiration for his new Pop paintings came from the explosion in popular culture and commercialism that America had witnessed following World War II. “The reason I’m painting this way,” he said “is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do, and do machine-like, is what I want to do” (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Swenson, "What is Pop Art?—Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1", Art News November 1962). Yet despite his championing of this new machine-like aesthetic, the traces of Warhol’s artistic hand can be seen throughout his work as he continuously and comprehensively strived to find new ways and processes to make his truly revolutionary form of art.
Eschewing the traditional study of studio art, as a student Warhol opted to follow a course in commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in his native Pittsburgh. After graduating in 1949 with a degree in Pictorial Design, Warhol moved to New York where he embarked on a lucrative career in magazine illustration and advertising. It was while developing a highly regarded reputation in this field that he first began to engage popular culture with fine art. Among his earliest works was Advertisement, 1961 (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Collection Marx, Berlin) in which Warhol paints a partly rendered Pepsi-Cola ad alongside images he sourced from the newspaper classifieds. Although mimicking the crisp, clean lines of the mass-produced advertisements, these earliest work do not shun completely signs of the artist’s hand as works such as Wigs, Make Him Want You (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) and Popeye, 1961 all possess the painterly drips and areas of active mark-making that had characterized the preceding Abstract Expressionist movement, something which would remain present throughout his career.
The hand-painted quality is also present in what is, perhaps, his most famous series of paintings and the ones which launched him to worldwide fame—his Campbell’s Soup Cans. Painted in 1962, 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (Museum of Modern Art, New York) is based on an illustration of the ubiquitous foodstuff taken from the stationary of the Campbell’s Soup Company. Warhol cut the source image from an envelope, removed the identifying “Tomato” moniker and then projected the image onto a canvas, inserting a hand-drawn label into the template for each of the different varieties. Each one was then hand painted, with some elements of the design—primarily the fleur-de-lis—applied individually, in this case probably using a carved rubber gum erasure as a stamp. Subsequent examples from his Campbell’s Soup Cans series were either hand painted, screen-printed or produced using acrylic spray paint. This medium was probably used because it allowed Warhol to proceed more quickly and with greater ease, especially in areas of delicate detail. It also allowed the delicate stencils to last longer as they were not subject to damage that was often caused by excessive pressure used in the screening process.
Even though some of his earliest soup can works were hand-painted they were among the first of Warhol’s paintings to closely mimic the mechanical printing process, not only in terms of their aesthetic qualities but also in terms of their seriality. He perfected his silkscreen technique with his Dollar Bills painted early in 1962, he embarked on a technique which would change the course of the art historical canon. “I started [silkscreening] when I was printing money,” Warhol admitted, “I had to draw it, and it came out looking too much like a drawing, so I thought wouldn’t it be a great idea to have it printed. Somebody said you could just put it on silkscreens. So when I went down to the silkscreener I just found out that you could reproduce photographs… I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something” (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Frei and N. Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, Vol. 1, New York, 2002, p. 131).
This use of photographs as source images became most apparent in his iconic paintings of Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Like much of the world, Warhol watched the events surrounding the President’s assassination unfold on television. Working from his home at 1342 Lexington Avenue in New York on November 22 1963, Warhol and Gerald Malanga were silkscreening The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) when news of Kennedy's association broke. In the following days Warhol scoured newspapers and magazines for portraits of the First Lady and eventually selected eight, which he then cropped to produce his desired aesthetic. He then ordered a screen to be made for each of the images, enlarging each to a finished size of 20 x 16 inches. Warhol then prepared a roll of primed linen and printed each impression by hand.
Works which used photographs as their source image would become central to Warhol’s oeuvre and resulted in some of the most iconic paintings of his career. His portraits of Kennedy, alongside Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley came to symbolize the highpoint of his career and made Warhol a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. However, even within his mechanically inspired aesthetic Warhol was still keen to integrate the notion of chance and even embrace it. Although intended to give uniform impressions time after time, the silkscreen process did succumb to the variances of human involvement. Thus, dependent on individual characteristics of the screen, the amount of inky residue remaining after each pass and the differing amounts of pressure used to make each impression, works from the same series made using the same screen can be remarkably different. His portraits of the Jackie Kennedy provided a particularly good illustration of this. The ghostly margins that are the result of the idiosyncratic screenprinting process only adds to the haunting nature of the image and reminds the viewer of the fleeting nature of life and how it can disappear without warning.
Far from balking at this phenomenon, Warhol embraced it. “In August `62 I started doing silkscreens,” he said. “The rubber-stamp method I’d been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too homemade; I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly-line effect. With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, but slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face – the first Marilyns” (A. Warhol as quoted in A. Warhol & P. Hackett, Popism, 1980, New York, p. 28).
The sense of spontaneity and risk, where no two canvases are exactly the same, is what sparked Warhol’s enthusiasm for this method of image making, along with the fact that it enabled him to harvest the mass of media images as his source material. Although often regarded as being the antithesis of so-called ‘action painting’ Warhol felt the silkscreen process alluded to a similar artistic language to the generation of Abstract Expression expressionist painters that preceded him. For Warhol the gestural nature and energy need to force the ink through the screen replicated the energetic methods of Pollock’s drips and de Kooning’s brushstrokes.
Following his early success, Warhol succumbed to producing a series of lucrative society portraits, using his unique aesthetic to produce commissioned paintings of the rich, famous and not so famous. It was only in the late 1970s and 1980s that he began to reintroduce visible signs of the artist’s hand to his work. Beginning with his portraits of Chairman Mao, he introduced a series of dramatic painterly gestures into what had previously been flat, monochromatic paintings. Warhol’s former assistant, Vincent Fremont, described the painterly nature of the artist’s method. “On the afternoon of December 7, 1972 Andy started to paint the background of a giant Mao painting… The large canvas was lying on the floor, the tall white doors that divided up the loft were open… Andy started to paint… Dipping into plastic buckets and jars of paint, there was no hesitation in his brushstrokes or his hand as he applied different colored paints in layers to the canvas” (V. Fremont, quoted by N. Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, Vol. 3, New York, 2010, p. 174).
Warhol’s background as a trained illustrator remained important to him throughout his life. Although he used pre-existing source imagery for much of his work, later in life he would return to a hand-drawn motif for one of his last great series his paintings, his Dollar Signs. Ironically, considering the endemic nature of the dollar, Warhol found that he was unable to find a pre-existing image of a dollar sign that had quite the visual impact he needed and he resorted to the skill that supported him during the early years of his career, his draughtsmanship, and drew dollar after dollar, some straight upright, some slanting, some thick, some thin, some more Pop, some more staid. The fact that the source image was one that Warhol created himself mark his Dollar Sign paintings out as a rarity within his body of work.
Although on the surface he appeared to eschew process, instead adopting the visual aesthetic of mass communication, his continuously evolving career ensured that he became one of the most inventive and innovative artists of his generation. His work encapsulates his most important ideas about fame, consumerism and popular culture and turns ubiquitous objects into images that are intensely personal portraits of the world he saw around him. More than half a century after their creation they remain enduring icons of American culture and a lasting symbols of the importance and impact of Andy Warhol’s art.
“Your Soup Can changed this country!”—Actress Ruth Warwick to Andy Warhol at the premiere of The Act with Liza Minnelli, quoted by A. Warhol & P. Hackett (ed.), The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York, 1989, p. 83).
There are perhaps few images that have come to symbolize the America dream more than a humble can of Campbell's Tomato Soup. The product has remained essentially the same in its formula and design since the early 1900s and has been a staple of American pantries for almost as long. A sign of American efficiency, ingenuity, democracy (the President eats the same Campbell’s soup as everybody else) and the growth of consumer culture, this ubiquitous product became one of the most pertinent symbols of the American postwar economic miracle. But it was Andy Warhol’s series of soup can paintings that probably did the most to engrain the image of the product on the American psyche. His 1962 iconic work 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (Museum of Modern Art, New York) became the cornerstone of the bourgeoning Pop art movement and would propel their creator to international fame and fortune. In addition, the Campbell's Soup cans became the perfect prototype for the myriad of other subjects, including celebrities, socialites, catastrophes, and other consumer products, that followed it and continued his mining of popular visual culture. The constancy of the Campbell's Soup can design was the perfect vehicle to explore the American desire for an easily definable identity. Seared into the popular consciousness, the continuity provided by Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can implies a sense of belonging and security as the idolization of movie stars provides a glorified sense of the American-type. Warhol's serial images perfectly reflect the inherent repetition of a consumer driven society.
In a 1963 interview, when asked why he chose something as ubiquitous as a can of soup as his subject, Warhol explained in his deadpan manner, "Because 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. Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea" (A. Warhol, quoted in I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, p. 18). With his soup can paintings he immortalized the Campbell's trademark, which was a turning point in the history of Pop art, leading to the product to become synonymous with Warhol himself.
Campbell’s Soup Can and Five Campbell’s Soup Cans were both painted in 1962 at what proved to be a turning point in Warhol’s career. As Kirk Varnedoe recounts in his 1971 essay "Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962," the gallery owner Irving Blum, during one of his yearly trips to New York to scout new talent, made his first visit to Warhol's studio. Not compelled by the brushy, crude imagery of Warhol's earlier works of superheroes and advertisements, Blum was confounded by this initial encounter. Luck would intervene on Warhol's behalf though and Blum had an unscheduled return to New York at the end of the year. Blum was once again urged to visit the young quirky artist. Entering the studio this time, Blum was confronted by the austere frontal portraits of Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans. Upon seeing these new paintings, Blum immediately offered Warhol a single-man show and the groundbreaking exhibition of Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in July of 1962 was born. The reverberations were enormous. The Ferus show established Warhol as one of the premier Pop artists. As Varnedoe writes, "After the 1962 show, the Campbell's Soup Can swiftly became something like Warhol's own house brand, a logo for everything that was outrageous about him. Along with enlarged comic-book Ben Day dots, it is now something of a visual sound bite for all Pop art, if not for a whole post-1960 attitude of hip irony" (K. Varnedoe, "Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962," Andy Warhol Retrospective, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2001, p. 44).
The rendering of his Campbell's Soup cans demonstrates that his desire to achieve the objective precision of mechanical reproduction is already in evidence. Warhol, with his finely tuned graphic designer's eye, knew that replicating the unadulterated red coloration and bold black lettering of the original design against a dramatically stark white background, would pack both a strong visual and conceptual punch, sending ripples through the art world that still reverberate today. Later in life Warhol reflected that it the Campbell's soup cans were among his favorite pictures. "I should have just done the Campbell’s Soups and kept on doing them ... well, because everybody only does one painting anyway" (A. Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol, (ed.) A. Michelson et. al., 2001 p. 124). Visually striking and highly memorable, they are iconic images of burgeoning consumer culture, and a characteristically savvy reflection of contemporary society and Warhol’s wider oeuvre.