Painting a lemon or a cabbage sounds like the humblest job in art, and the French Royal Academy ranked it last. Yet every object on these tables was chosen with care, and some carry more than they show, from a wedding knife with the painter's name on it to a joke sent back to a collector who paid too much.
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How These Were Chosen
A still life is a painting of things that do not move: fruit, flowers, food, dishes, a glass, a skull. The painter picks every object, sets it on a table and decides where the light falls. Fruit holds still for days, at least until it begins to rot.
That control kept painters coming back. A peel, a pewter plate and a glass of water each catch the light differently, so one table can test a whole craft. Buyers wanted these pictures for the costly things they showed or for the warnings they carried.
A picture is here because it changed what a still life could look like or say. Each painter appears once, and the count runs back in time. Read upward from the oldest, one tabletop takes on new jobs: plain food with a warning or a prayer, then luxury, then color and shape, then a supermarket shelf.
12. Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)
Thirty-two cans of Campbell's soup stand in rows, one can to a canvas, each label crowned by the same white script on a red band. Only the lower half changes from one canvas to the next, where the flavor is spelled out in red capitals. Andy Warhol painted the set in 1962 in his house on Lexington Avenue in New York, one canvas for each of the thirty-two soups Campbell's sold that year.
The idea of a shelf came from the gallery that first showed them. The canvases went on view at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, in a show that opened on July 9, 1962, and Irving Blum, who ran the gallery, could not get them to hang level. He fixed a narrow ledge beneath them, so that each can seemed to stand on a store shelf. "Cans sit on shelves. Why not?" he said.
Seen in a row like that, the cans began to look like a single work. During the show Blum sold five of them. Then he changed his mind, decided the cans only made sense together, and persuaded each buyer to return the canvas. Warhol agreed that the thirty-two belonged together as one series, and they have stayed together ever since.
From across a room, the whole set looks printed. In fact Warhol painted every can by hand. He projected a drawing onto each canvas so the outlines would match, and pressed the ring of fleurs-de-lis around the base with a rubber stamp. Up close the copies drift apart: the red leans toward orange on some labels, and one can has lost its gold band. Only later did he adopt silkscreen printing, which spared him that handwork.
At a Glance
Artist: Andy Warhol (1928 to 1987)
Painted: 1962
Medium: Acrylic with metallic enamel paint on canvas
Size: 32 canvases, each 50.8 × 40.6 cm (20 × 16 in)
Where to see it: Museum of Modern Art, New York
About This Painting
Why did Warhol paint Campbell's soup cans?
His own answer was lunch: "I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years." He had also just dropped his comic-strip pictures after seeing Roy Lichtenstein's. "He keeps doing them better than I did them," he told Blum.
Did Campbell's soup sue Andy Warhol?
No. The company worried at first about the use of its trademark and considered legal action, then let it go. In 1964 it sent soup to Warhol's home and commissioned a painting from him for a retiring board member.
11. Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888)
Some still full of petals, some bare, a few already turned into dark discs of seed, fifteen sunflowers crowd a bulging earthenware pot. Vincent van Gogh painted them in Arles, in Provence, in August 1888, the fourth canvas of sunflowers he had begun in a single week. This time he gave the flowers nothing to stand out against. The wall behind them is yellow, the table beneath them is yellow, and so are the flowers.