Art Lovers discussion

32 Short Thoughts About Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can Paintings at MoMA



Herewith, in honor of the 32 flavors of Warhol’s cans, are 32 Short Thoughts About Campbell’s Soup (with apologies to scholars who may have had some of these thoughts before me):

1) These 32 canvases are pretty much old-school paintings, without much in common with actual ads. Like most Pop art, that is, they are distinctly high art that happens to riff on the low. They do not undo the difference; they need it in order to mean anything.

2) MoMA is presenting all 32 “flavors” in one room, in one long line, to mimic the way they were shown in their first exhibition, in July of 1962 at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. (Since then, they’ve usually been hung in a modernist grid.) As at Ferus, all 32 are standing at MoMA on a long shelf about three inches wide, which is almost always billed as evoking supermarket display. But when was the last time you saw a three-inch deep shelf at your local Gristedes? (That was Warhol’s grocer, right across Lexington Avenue from the home where he painted his Soups.) The shelf at Ferus and MoMA is much more like the ones used to display precious prints and paintings, when they’re brought out for consideration at a fine picture gallery – the kind of place Warhol frequented around this time as he built his own collection.

3) Another bromide I don’t buy: That Warhol’s decade in commercial art was what led him to make art about commercial products. As several of his early clients have explained – and as a bit of social history proves – his illustrations were seen as deploying elite styles to sell high-end goods. His commercial work was closer to traditional, conservative artmaking than his Pop art was; it didn’t lead him to Pop. Pop was actually his escape from his commercial past, into something more serious and radical.

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