Andy Warhol was an American artist, born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928 and dead in New York in 1987. He started as a commercial illustrator, became the face of Pop Art with his Campbell's soup cans and his Marilyn Monroe portraits in 1962, and ran a studio called the Factory that turned out paintings, films and fame. Most people who type his name want the soup cans, and the soup cans were first shown to a room that laughed at them.
In the summer of 1962 a Los Angeles gallery hung 32 small paintings of soup cans on shelves, and Los Angeles did not know whether to laugh or to buy.
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The show opened at the Ferus Gallery on 9 July 1962. There was one canvas for each flavor Campbell's sold, and the owner, Irving Blum, lined them up on narrow shelves along the wall, like cans in a supermarket aisle. A dealer down the street answered with a window full of real cans and a sign saying the original was available at two for 33 cents.
Blum sold five of the paintings, mostly to friends, and the actor Dennis Hopper was one of the buyers. Then he changed his mind. Before the show closed he took the five back, because the pictures only worked as a set, and he agreed to pay Warhol 1,000 dollars for all 32, spread over ten months.
The canvases look like products, and they were made like paintings. Warhol projected a soup can onto each blank canvas, traced the outline, and filled it in by hand with a brush. The fleur-de-lys at the bottom of every label was stamped on, and it came out uneven. The man who said he wanted to be a machine had painted his most famous machine-made image himself.
What You'll Discover
What he drew before the soup cans.
Who really paired the Marilyns.
Who he put on stage.
Who else was in the room.
What he said about being a machine.
How a routine operation ended.