Campbell's Soup Cans

What's on the canvas

The same soup, thirty-two times over

Thirty-two canvases of identical size hang in front of you, each 20 by 16 inches (51 by 41 cm); in MoMA's permanent galleries they're usually arranged in a tight grid, four rows of eight. Every canvas shows a Campbell's soup can shot head-on, with no table and no shadow: the top half of the label red, the bottom half white, a gold oval medallion between them.

The only thing that changes from canvas to canvas is a single word. "Tomato," "Chicken Noodle," "Bean with Bacon," "Vegetable," "Consomme" - Warhol hand-copied all thirty-two flavors Campbell Soup Company sold in 1962, without altering a letter of the company's own typeface.

That label design hadn't changed in over sixty years by 1962. The red-and-white scheme wasn't dreamed up by a designer at all: in 1898, Campbell's treasurer Herberton Williams watched a Cornell-Penn football game from the stands and borrowed Cornell's team colors for the can. The gold medallion isn't decoration either - it's a faithful copy of the medal the soup won at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Warhol didn't invent that badge of quality; he just copied it onto canvas thirty-two times in a row.

Still, the canvas isn't a billboard: the can reads noticeably larger than an actual tin, but nowhere near poster scale. A year later, blowing up Marilyn Monroe's face to nearly seven feet, Warhol would go much further. Here the size was chosen so the canvas could hang like a painting and, just as easily, sit on a shelf like a product.

That same year Warhol also produced three large grid canvases that repeated a single flavor a hundred or two hundred times over, instead of varying the word from can to can. Next to those, the current set of thirty-two is the rarer case in his soup-can output: what changes between canvases is the label's word, not the repeat count.

How it was made

An eraser stamp, not a silkscreen

The common assumption that the soup cans were silkscreened from the start is wrong. In early 1962, when Warhol painted the series in his townhouse studio at 1342 Lexington Avenue, he hadn't yet switched to photographic silkscreen - that only entered his practice that autumn, after Marilyn Monroe's death in August. The soup cans were made by hand, in several distinct steps.

First, a pencil outline of the can was transferred to each canvas - probably projected from the same master drawing for all thirty-two versions. The can itself and the background were then painted by hand in casein and synthetic polymer paint. The flavor name was also projected and traced with a brush, so the lettering looks identical across all thirty-two canvases without actually being mechanically identical - the line wavers slightly, the way a hand-drawn line does. Only the gold fleur-de-lis pattern along the bottom rim was applied with a stamp, cut from a rubber eraser and pressed thirty-two times over.

That compromise between hand and stamp is the series' real technical trick: an artist imitating mechanical repetition by hand, before he owned an actual silkscreen. Getting the paintings in front of a dealer came down to a tip: Ivan Karp, an associate at the Leo Castelli Gallery, urged Irving Blum to visit Warhol's studio. Blum found six soup cans simply leaning against the wall on the floor, and almost immediately offered Warhol a show at his young Los Angeles gallery, Ferus.

According to the Warhol catalogue raisonné, he painted roughly fifty soup-can canvases between November 1961 and mid-1962, and only thirty-two of them, finished by June, became the definitive set Ferus Gallery eventually exhibited.

Where the imagery came from

From shoe ads to a soup can

Before he became a painter, Warhol spent more than a decade earning a living as a commercial illustrator. His first assignment - shoe drawings for Glamour - came in 1949, and from 1955 he was the sole illustrator for the shoe company I. Miller, his loose "blotted-line" ads running in the New York Times every Sunday; Women's Wear Daily half-jokingly crowned him "the Leonardo of the shoe trade." He spent nearly a decade drawing other people's merchandise for other people's storefronts - in 1962 he simply turned that same eye on his own canvas, minus the client and the slogan.

The tradition he was quietly demolishing shows up best by contrast. Van Gogh's Starry Night is a painting where every brushstroke announces the artist's own feeling; in Soup Cans, Warhol pointedly stripped that away - the gesture, the emotion, the unrepeatable touch of the hand. A year later he'd apply the same trick to a far more venerable image: in Thirty Are Better Than One he repeated the Mona Lisa thirty times over - a painting already endlessly duplicated on postcards and tea towels long before he got to it - proving the same mechanism worked on the most famous portrait in Western art, not just on a can of soup.

One oft-repeated account credits the idea to Muriel Latow, a decorator friend who in late 1961 allegedly urged Warhol to paint “something you see every day that everybody would recognize – like a can of Campbell’s soup,” for a $50 fee paid by check. The story survives only through friends’ recollections, not Warhol’s own account.

What happened to it

From a $100 shelf item to a $15 million acquisition

The series was first shown on July 9, 1962, at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles - no formal opening, and Warhol himself stayed in New York. Blum hung the canvases in a single row and, unable to get the line perfectly level, propped them on a wooden ledge - and that's how the grocery-shelf association that's followed the work ever since was born. The paintings sold for $100 apiece; only five or six buyers came forward, actor Dennis Hopper among them, each taking a single canvas.

Blum decided the series shouldn't be broken up. He bought back the canvases that had already sold and later arranged with Warhol to buy all thirty-two together for $1,000, paid off in installments over the following year. Blum held the complete set for more than three decades, until 1996, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired it in full - partly as his gift, partly through several museum acquisition funds - in a deal valued at roughly $15 million.

Today the canvases hang in MoMA's permanent collection, usually as a grid of four rows of eight - the most practical way to fit them into the gallery. The arrangement isn't random: since Warhol never specified an order, the museum sequenced the cans chronologically by the date each flavor launched - Tomato, the oldest, dating to 1897, sits in the top left corner. In the 2015 show "Campbell's Soup Cans and Other Works, 1953-1967," the frames and Plexiglas came off and, for the first time inside the museum, the canvases went back to their original form - a single line on a ledge, exactly as Blum had hung them in 1962.

The opening drew more than just five or six buyers: a rival dealer, Primus-Stuart Gallery down the block from Ferus, filled its own window with real soup cans under a sign reading “Do Not Be Misled. Get the Original. Our Low Price 2 for 33 Cents” – a direct jab at the $100 asking price for a hand-painted canvas.

Its afterlife in culture

The soup that outlasted the gallery

The label "one of the most recognizable works of the 20th century" gets attached to nearly everything eventually, but here it's close to literal fact: Campbell's soup can has been quoted more often than almost any other image in Pop art. The Simpsons restaged the painting twice, in "Brush with Greatness" (1991) and "Mom and Pop Art" (1999); the cans turn up in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) and in Minions (2015).

In 1966-67 the image migrated onto the "Souper Dress," a paper dress the Campbell Soup Company itself mailed out - customers sent in a dollar and labels from two cans of vegetable soup to get one; an example now sits in the Metropolitan Museum's collection. In 1979, graffiti artists Fab Five Freddy and Lee Quinones painted a New York subway car with a row of soup cans, a gesture that pulled gallery Pop art straight into street culture. In 2012, marking the painting's fiftieth anniversary, Campbell's itself put out 1.2 million special-edition cans styled after Warhol's labels on supermarket shelves; Vans and later Converse both borrowed the image for sneaker collaborations.

The real shift the painting gets credit for is easier to state as a question it settled than as a list of quotes: can an object from a kitchen shelf be the subject of a museum painting without irony and without a lesson attached. Since 1962, dozens of artists - from Jeff Koons to Damien Hirst - have answered yes. Where Warhol himself took that license next is worth following up on his own artist page.

Warhol offered his own explanation to ARTnews in 1963: “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.” That line has been quoted ever since as the reason for the soup, even though Warhol was notoriously unreliable about facts concerning himself.