Andy Warhol is famous for painting a can of Campbell's soup. In July 1962, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, he showed 32 canvases of them, one for each flavor the company sold. A few weeks later he ran Marilyn Monroe's face through a silkscreen, and those two images are still what most people picture when they hear his name.
By the time he died in 1987 he was also a filmmaker, the founder of Interview magazine and a man who had turned his own face into a brand.
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The soup cans were not mass produced. Warhol drew each can in pencil on the canvas, projected the lettering onto it, traced it, and painted the label with a brush. The fleur-de-lis ringing the bottom edge of every can was stamped by hand.
The machine came afterward. Silkscreen entered his work only after the Ferus show, and with it the repeated, mechanical look everyone now calls Warhol. The summer that made him famous was spent painting one canvas at a time.
I find that more revealing than any slogan about assembly lines. The man who later wanted art to look mass produced began as a very careful craftsman.
Who was Andy Warhol before the soup?
A successful commercial illustrator. According to the Andy Warhol Museum, he was an award-winning illustrator throughout the 1950s, with clients such as Tiffany & Co., I. Miller Shoes, Bonwit Teller, Columbia Records and Vogue. His work first appeared in Glamour in 1949, in a story called "What is Success?"
He had built his own technique, the blotted line, which he developed in college. It mixed ink drawing with printmaking, so a single drawing could be transferred again and again.
Fine art was harder. Early in the decade the Tanager Gallery turned down drawings he submitted because of their subject, two men embracing. In 1956 the Bodley Gallery gave him a solo show, "Studies for a Boy Book."
So the man who arrived in Los Angeles in 1962 was no naive outsider. He had spent years making images designed to be repeated and sold. That still does not explain why he picked a can of soup.
What You'll Discover
Who gave him the idea.
What a rival dealer put in his window.
The publicity photo behind his Marilyns.
Who really said fifteen minutes.