Andy Warhol | Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato)

Andy Warhol
Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato)
Boston, USA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1966
48.9 x 43.2 cm.
Edition size unknown


Warhol first painted Cambell's Soup cans in 1962 and continued with the motif throughout his life. This 1966 shopping bag, published alongside an exhibition at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, was the second paper shopping bag. The first screen-printed Soup Can bags were produced for the iconic Pop Art exhibition “The American Supermarket,” organized byBen Birillo in October 1964, at the Bianchini Gallery in New York. Roy Lichtenstein produced a Turkey shopping bag for the same occasion.

It has been suggested that it was other pop artists that led him to the subject matter: the impact of seeing Claes Oldenburg’s Store in 1961, or the Painted Bronze ale cans of Jasper Johns a year prior. Or possibly learning that Lichtenstein was also painting comic strip imagery, led Warhol to seek out alternatives.

Various people have taken credit for suggesting that he paint soup cans over the years. According to Warhol friend Ted Carey, it was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the idea for the cans (as well as for Warhol's money paintings).

Marcel Duchamp dismissed the subject matter as not particularly relevant: "If you take a Campbell Soup Can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell soup cans on a canvas.”

Robert Indiana said: "I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup.”However, Ted Carey’s lover, John Mann, maintained that Warhol painted the Campbell's Soup Cans precisely because he disliked the soup.

Warhol himself was characteristically coy in interviews, declining to answer, or producing answers that contradicted one another. One consistent is that he ate soup every day of his life as a child (for "twenty years"), but he also made clear to note that he ate sandwiches just as often.

Two years before his death, the artist was interviewed for The Face magazine by Fiona Russell Powell and David Yarritu. "I heard that your mother used to make these little tin flowers and sell them to help support you in the early days,” asked Yarritu.

"Oh God, yes, it's true,” Warhol replied, “the tin flowers were made out of those fruit cans, that's the reason why I did my first tin-can paintings...You take a tin-can, the bigger the tin-can the better, like the family size ones that peach halves come in, and I think you cut them with scissors. It's very easy and you just make flowers out of them. My mother always had lots of cans around, including the soup cans."

Reflecting on his career, Warhol cited the Campbell’s Soup Can as his favourite work, adding: "I should have just done the Campbell’s Soups and kept on doing them ... because everybody only does one painting anyway."