Campbell's Soup I

Ten cans, ten flavors, and almost no difference between them. That is the playful trick at the heart of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup I, a 1968 set of prints built around an object most people had sitting in their kitchen cupboards. Black Bean, Chicken Noodle, Tomato, Onion, and the rest all wear the same red and white label, lined up like products on a grocery shelf. Warhol first painted the soup cans in 1962, and the subject became a kind of signature for him. Legend has it he picked Campbell's because he had eaten it for lunch nearly every day for twenty years.

Pop Art was all about pulling everyday images out of stores and advertisements and putting them where fine paintings usually hung. Warhol pushed that idea further than most, offering something deliberately flat, repetitive, and machine-made instead of something soulful or handpainted. Plenty of people found it baffling at the time, and a few were downright irritated. Others recognized a sharp comment on a culture drowning in brands and packaging. Decades later the joke has faded and the observation remains, since we are arguably even more surrounded by familiar logos now than Warhol was then.