In 1996, the museum bought the 32 paintings from Irving Blum as a combination gift and sale valued upwards of $15 million-a jaw-dropping return on his $1,000 investment in 1962. In the end, Warhol’s soup cans were recognized as museum-worthy art, by no less than The Museum of Modern Art. One of the most striking images involved Warhol himself-the May 1969 cover of Esquire magazine showed him drowning in a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Today, Warhol soup cans remain a pop culture icon, turning up on everything from plates and mugs to neckties, t-shirts, surfboards and skateboard decks. READ MORE: Nine of the Most Collectible School Lunch Boxes, 1935 to Now The price: $1 and two Campbell’s Soup labels.

Each dress had three gold bands at the bottom, so the wearer could snip her dress to the ideal length without cutting into the soup can pattern. In the late 1960s, the company jumped on the then-popular fad for paper dresses, coming out with the Souper Dress, a kicky little number covered in Warhol-esque soup labels. It didn’t take long for Campbell’s Soups itself to join the fun. He arranged real cans of Campbell’s Soup in his window, along with a sign that read: “Do Not Be Misled.

“But the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodle gives me a real Zen feeling.” An art dealer down the street from Ferus Gallery was even more biting. “Frankly, the cream of asparagus does nothing for me,” one art lover says to another, standing in the gallery. A cartoon in the Los Angeles Times lampooned the paintings and their supposed viewers. “This young ‘artist’ is either a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan,” one critic wrote. In fact, what little response that came from either the public or art critics could be harsh. The show didn’t make the splash Blum and Warhol hoped for. “Cans sit on shelves,” he later said about his installation. People had no idea what to make of art that was so different from everything that art was supposed to be.įor one thing, Irving Blum, one of the owners of Ferus Gallery, chose to display the paintings on narrow shelves running the length of the gallery, not unlike a supermarket aisle. When Warhol’s show opened in 1962, Pop was just getting started. Why Ukraine Has Seen Centuries of Conflict “Did he just like the gold circle’s graphic punch?” “Is it simply because other paints don’t stick well on top of gold? Because getting the medals just right would take too much work and might never look good, anyway?” pondered Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik. Instead of detailing the intricate medallion at the center of every can's label-representing the “gold medal of excellence” that Campbell’s Soup won at the 1900 Paris Exposition-Warhol substituted a plain gold circle.

It Killed Him 19 Years Laterīut there’s one thing all 32 paintings have in common. READ MORE: Andy Warhol Was Shot By Valerie Solanas. Although they were supposed to look like they’d been made mechanically, every painting was slightly different-and not only in the flavor on the label. In using fine art techniques to depict an everyday manufactured object, Warhol captured an essential contradiction in Pop art. Small details-tiny splashes of red on the Tomato Soup painting, the unevenly applied fleur-de-lys stamp on others-betrayed the paintings’ handmade origins. For consistency, he used a hand stamp to make the fleur-de-lys pattern around each label’s bottom edge, but he didn’t always get it right. To make the “Campbell’s Soup Can” paintings, Warhol projected the image of a soup can onto his blank canvas, traced the outline and details, then carefully filled it in using old-fashioned brushes and paint.

Andy warhol museum