Campbell's Soup II

Ten soup cans sit in tidy rows, each wearing the same red and white Campbell's label, yet every one advertises a different flavor. Scotch Broth, Oyster Stew, Cheddar Cheese, and the curiously titled Hot Dog Bean all get equal billing. Andy Warhol created this piece in 1969 as part of his second series built around Campbell's Soup, and the repetition is the whole point. Something you would breeze past in a grocery store suddenly demands your attention when it hangs on a wall in careful formation.

Warhol was a driving force behind Pop Art, a movement that grabbed images from billboards, comic strips, and supermarket shelves and treated them as fine art. He was drawn to the plain and the mass produced, once pointing out that a rich person and a poor person drink the exact same Coke and eat the exact same soup. To make these prints he used silkscreen, the very method commercial printers relied on for posters, which gave the finished work a cool, machine made look with almost no trace of the artist's hand.

A personal thread runs through the choice of subject too. Warhol said he ate Campbell's soup for lunch nearly every day across twenty years, so these cans were as familiar to him as they were to countless American kitchens. You can read the work as a sharp comment on consumer culture, or simply as a witty nod to a daily meal. Either way, it asks a fair question about why we so easily overlook the ordinary things surrounding us.