How the Campbell’s Soup Paintings Became Andy Warhol’s Meal Ticket (2024)

On February 22, 1987, Andy Warhol died at age 58 following a gall-bladder operation at New York Hospital. That day, in something of a cosmic coincidence, Irving Blum, the Los Angeles gallerist who in 1962 had given Warhol his first solo exhibition as a fine artist, was busy preparing to ship the 32 paintings from that show to the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C. For 25 years, Blum had owned the works (each 20 inches tall by 16 inches wide), keeping them in their original slotted crate and occasionally hanging them in his dining room in a large grid (four rows of seven or eight across), often to his guests’ great amusem*nt. They depicted soup cans—more to the point, the 32 varieties of Campbell’s condensed soup that were available in 1962, from Bean with Bacon to Vegetarian Vegetable. Blum, visiting the artist at his Manhattan town house in the spring of that year and watching him work on the paintings while pop songs and arias blared simultaneously from a record player and a radio, took the chance of inviting the relatively unknown Warhol to show the whole set at his Ferus Gallery, on North La Cienega Boulevard.

Warhol hesitated. L.A. was terra incognita; New York was where the action was. Blum realized he had to come up with a lure, and he took note of a photo of Marilyn Monroe—a soon-to-be Warhol subject—that the artist had clipped from a magazine. “I thought he was a tiny bit movie struck,” Blum recalls with gusto, reciting the details, which have the sturdy flavor of a folk tale. “I said, ‘Andy, movie stars come into the gallery.’ And he said, ‘Wow! Let’s do it!’ The truth was that movie stars”—with the exception of the art-besotted Dennis Hopper—“never came into the gallery.”

Blum, who turns 88 this year but retains his imposingly upright posture and sonorous, Cary Grant-inflected voice, also might have sensed that Warhol was desperate. For years, the 33-year-old, Pittsburgh-born commercial artist had been trying to get traction with a New York gallery, to no avail. The fine-art world viewed him as a preposterous character better suited to filing colorful drawings for Glamour and the like. What’s more, Warhol had just ended his long-running, lucrative association with the shoe company I. Miller, for which he’d created award-winning, nubbly lined illustrations. Billy Al Bengston, one of the artists who helped put Ferus on the map, and who also showed in New York, befriended Warhol in the mid-1950s and remembered him hanging around the margins. “He was a creepy son of a bitch,” he says. “I liked him.”

In 1961, Warhol believed he was about to have his big breakthrough with a batch of paintings inspired by comic books, but Roy Lichtenstein had beaten him to the punch. “He did it so much better,” Warhol admitted. He needed a new idea. A friend, the interior designer Muriel Latow, charged Warhol $50 for one: make paintings of money, she said. And she tossed in a second idea for free: Campbell’s. Her instincts—and Blum’s—were perfectly attuned to the materialistic climate, and well timed. The Pop-Art Express was just about to leave the station: Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg were already on board, taking on real subjects from commercial culture and leaving Abstract Expressionism, with its brushy and brooding explorations of the self, behind.

What ensued at Ferus, which opened its show of Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s-soup-can paintings on July 9, 1962 (the same week the first Walmart opened and the United States conducted a high-altitude nuclear test over the Pacific Ocean), became an indelible chapter in the cosmology of modern American art. It was a big-bang moment for Pop and for everything that came after. It was also the big-bang moment for the artist himself: the night Warhol became Warhol. It was pre-Factory, pre-Solanas, pre-society portraits, pre-Studio 54, pre-Interview. Fifty-six years after that first Warhol show, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art will open the latest one, on November 12, “Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again.” It’s the first American-organized Warhol retrospective since the Museum of Modern Art’s, 29 years ago.

The more than 350 pieces on view, across all media, will finally allow museum-goers to survey in full the career of the inscrutable, bewigged artist whose image is about as familiar as Bugs Bunny’s. The show will likely attract more eyeballs than any New York art event in recent memory. And those eyeballs will inevitably gravitate toward the suite of 32 soup-can paintings. “It’s the most iconic,” says Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator and deputy director for programs, who spearheaded the retrospective. “When you’re thinking of Pop art, of Warhol, you’re thinking of the soup can.”

“Warhol has now been gone for more than 30 years,” Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg writes in the show’s catalogue, “yet the Warholian view of the world endures.” That worldview made its debut at Ferus on a balmy Monday night in the summer of 1962. Irving Blum had made the decision to display the paintings single file along narrow ledges that, to some, evoked supermarket shelves. It was also a hell of a lot easier than getting out a bubble level and evenly hanging 32 identically sized pictures. Bengston says that he and another Ferus artist, Robert Irwin, were called upon to hang the show; the gallery was hands-on like that. Blum priced the paintings at $100 each: Warhol would get $50 a pop. Monthly gallery rent was $60.

Ferus was known for its big personalities and raucous openings full of noise and smoke. Warhol didn’t make it to the show, but a number of important artists did. Ed Ruscha, also represented by Ferus, recalls that he found the exhibition “shocking.” The stark red-white-and-gold design, which Campbell’s had introduced in 1898, inspired by Cornell’s football uniforms, seemed to glow—blank, goofy, sinister—on the gallery walls. “They were meant to be bad and they were meant to be badass,” Ruscha says. “They were jarring.” (He was desperate to buy one but couldn’t afford the $50 in-house discount price.)

For Bengston, the pictures were “just boring.” In fact, he says, “I still think they’re boring.” Blum remembers Bengston saying he’d already “done soup cans” in art school and stalking out of the opening; Bengston says there’s no way that happened. Conceptual artist John Baldessari checked out the show and thought, perhaps liberatingly: “Wow, I guess he thinks he can get away with this.” He came to feel that “everything Warhol did later was already there in the soup cans.”

The 32 paintings looked to be machine made, yet no two—Scotch Broth, Green Pea, Black Bean—were exactly alike. Warhol’s fastidious craft—the clever use of projections, hand-applied casein paint, a homemade stamp cut from a gum eraser for the cans’ gold fleur-de-lis pattern—had created something that looked eerily like mechanical production, but not quite. Warhol liked to deploy the catchy sound bite “I want to be a machine.” If this was an artist’s exercise in being a machine, it was one in which the artist’s hand made the machine human.

The press went nuts. The Los Angeles Times ran a cartoon with one Beatnik art-lover saying to another, “Frankly, the Cream of Asparagus does nothing for me, but the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodle gives me a real Zen feeling.” Columnist Jack Smith suspected Warhol of having “his tongue in his cheek.” (You think?) Blum patiently informed Smith that the paintings were “terrifying, Kafka-esque.” Passionate belief or sales blather? “I took them very seriously,” Blum says, “and I took Andy seriously.” But it all made for easy parody. The Primus-Stuart Gallery, up the street, got into the act, stacking actual Campbell’s-soup cans in its window, topped with Turkey Vegetable and affixed with a sign: DO NOT BE MISLED. GET THE ORIGINAL. OUR LOW PRICE—TWO FOR 33 CENTS. Artforum’s write-up framed the show as campy 1930s nostalgia. The reviewer had a clear favorite: Onion.