Oyster Stew, from Campbell's Soup II

This is Andy Warhol's Oyster Stew, part of his second Campbell's Soup series from 1969. The can looks almost exactly like the one you might have pulled off a grocery shelf back then, right down to the small yellow banner that says "Important! Add whole milk." Warhol first tackled these soup cans in 1962, and the concept was straightforward yet daring: take something completely ordinary, an item millions of Americans knew by heart, and present it as art worth hanging on a wall. By this later series, he had widened the roster of flavors to include less common ones like this oyster stew, complete with its promise of Grade AA butter.

Warhol helped lead the Pop Art movement, which drew its energy from advertising, packaging, and the products of everyday life. He was drawn to the idea that a can of soup treated everyone equally, no matter their wealth, and he famously claimed to have eaten Campbell's soup for lunch almost daily across two decades. Choosing screen printing, a method used in commercial factories, was a deliberate wink at the whole notion of what counts as fine art. The point of a piece like this is not classic beauty but the odd little jolt of seeing something so familiar staged as though it deserved a second glance.