Andy Warhol - Can of Soup

In Andy Warhol’s time, no serious painter would have thought to paint such an ordinary object as a can of soup. But Warhol did. And his fame came from his ability to turn everyday objects into intriguing works of art.

There are contradicting stories published as to who gave Warhol the idea to paint soup cans. The most commonly printed version goes like this. In 1960, his friend Muriel Latow came to visit. During that time Warhol was discouraged with his work. He discovered that he was doing the same kind of modern comic strip art as another local artist Roy Lichtenstein but Roy was more successful. So, he asked Latow, who happened to own an art gallery herself, for advice. She said, “You should paint something that everybody sees everyday…like a can of soup.”

He took her advice. He started making “portraits” of each of the 32 varieties of Campbell’s soups against a white background. “Tomato soup will never be just tomato soup again,” said critic Ivan Karp quoted in Warhol, By David Bourdon.

Over the next two years, he continued to paint a series of Campbell’s soup cans. Sometimes he used stencils and other times he used pencil, ink, crayons, acrylic and oil paints. He painted enormous still lifes or sad-looking soups with torn labels. Often times he multiplied the can image with the silkscreen method. One of the most famous pieces in the series is 100 Cans multiplying Beef Noodle soup 100 times.

His soup series appeared in an art gallery in the summer of 1962. But not everyone appreciated his new approach to modern art. According to Andy Warhol: Pop Art Painter, by Susan Coldman Rubin, a supermarket stacked Campbell’s soup in the window with a sign that read, “the real thing for only 29 cents a can.” He used the public putdown as publicity. He took a photographer to the market and had his picture taken signing the cans of soup. The photo appeared in newspapers everywhere, according to Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, by Bob Colacello.

He went on to paint other inanimate objects in this artistic phase. He painted dollar bills, Brillo pads and Heinz ketchup boxes, and Coca-Cola bottles. “I just paint things I always thought were beautiful . . . things you use every day and never think about,” said Warhol, quoted in Victor Bockirs’ book The Life and Death of Andy Warhol. He had a way of choosing objects from American culture that have achieved a genuinely iconic status in contemporary civilization. Warhol often multiplied the images over and over on the same canvas creating the idea that his art like the objects themselves were made by a machine. Warhol even once said, “The reason I’m painting this was is that I want to be a machine.”

In 1980, Warhol declared that he wished to be remembered as a soup can, which may very well become the case. Now, his art is celebrated worldwide and shown continually in museums almost always showcasing his Campbell’s representations.

At the end of his career in 1983, The Campbell’s Soup Company hired him to create a new series of paintings of their dry soup mixes.

A reporter once asked him, “Did you ever image when you painted your first soup can, that it would become art?”

“No,” said Andy. “It’s like anything. You just work. If it happens, it happens.”

Andy Warhol - Marilyn Monroe

It was her fame, eroticism, and mysterious death that fascinated Warhol and inspired a “painted print” series honoring Marilyn Monroe. It was just after her mysterious suicide in 1962 that Warhol started the series. It ironically linked his previous work, which focused on images of death to his next phase: celebrity portraits.

Warhol’s portraits constitute a genuine gallery of the most influential and famous figures of his age. Politicians, movie stars, and art dealers are among the many named in this long list. They were emblems of beauty, glamour, and power.

It is fitting that Miss Beauty and Glamour Herself begins Warhol’s tribute to Hollywood’s celebrities. Like many of his star models, Warhol actually met Monroe in person. “She fascinated me as she did the rest of America,” Warhol was quoted saying in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews by Kenneth Goldsmith.

The Marilyn series was a reproduction of the famous promotional image for the 1953 film “Niagara.” He made the photo into a silkscreen and screened a single image of her face onto small canvases. He then multiplied her image in Six Marilyns, Marilyn Twenty Times, and One Hundred Marilyns. In some pieces he just painted her ruby lips and blonde hair with contrasting skin colors. In another Marilyn, he took multiple images of her lips, one of her most sensual and familiar features, creating a sort of kissing machine. For the famous Gold Marilyn Monroe, he painted the entire canvas with gold paint with a single picture of her face in the silkscreen depicting her as a goddess of sensuality.

A turning point in Warhol’s career was when Architect Philip Johnson, director of the Architecture and Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased Gold Marilyn Monroe for the museum. This gave Warhol great credence in the art world especially when a panel of critics, curators, and art historians saw his Gold Marilyn in the museum. That day they named the new modern art movement “Pop Art” short for popular, with Warhol as a pioneer.

Through his career, he went on to do portraits of many other well-known figures such as Mao, Jackie Kennedy, Liz Taylor, and Dolly Parton. Even his self-portraits became famous for his unique imagery and conceptual style.

He created his usually larger-than-life portraits by first taking a snapshot of the subject, often with a simple Polaroid camera. He would then blow it up and transfer it in glue onto silk, and then toll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. Using this silkscreen method, you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was simple, quick, and chancy.

It was like an art assembly line, creating works with double or multiple portraits emphasizing the overwhelming presence of his models in popular culture. The multiple images created a sense of a manufactured celebrity made by Hollywood.

The more celebrity portraits he did increased his own fame and wealth. It not only increased the amount of celebrities he actually knew personally but the ease of replicating these portraits gave a boost to his success and profits. Warhol never concealed the fact that the genre had become an easy money-making tool for him.

History of Western Paintings - IV - Minoan Art

The flowering of the Minoan civilization, centred on the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, coincided with the New Kingdom in Egypt and the Babylonian period of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. “Minoan” comes from the name “Minos” the king of Crete in Greek mythology who provided the human-flesh-eating Minotaur, a half-man and half-bull monster, with a constant supply of young men and women from Athens. After the late nineteenth-century discoveries of sites thought to have existed only in the cre­ative mind of Homer, such as Troy in Turkey, and Mycenae on the Greek mainland, the English scholar Sir Arthur Evans set out to discover ancient Crete. Due to the lack of decipherable texts, we know less about Minoan society than we do about ancient Egypt or the ancient Near East and thus Minoan art remains somewhat mysterious. Furthermore, earthquakes and, apparently, warfare with the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland resulted in the destruction of many Minoan palaces and works of art.

The surviving Minoan wall paintings come from the ruins of the palace complexes, the best example of which is at Knossos on Crete, excavated and (over-) restored in parts by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. It is unclear precisely what functions the palaces served. They seem to have been religious, economic, and administrative centres, as well as the rulers’ homes. The myth of the Minotaur, son of Minos’ queen, Pasiphae and a sacred white bull, describes a labyrinth built by the ingenious Daedalus to contain the mon­ster. The palace complexes are themselves labyrinthine, consisting of many open, airy courtyards, private apartments, storage rooms, shrines and baths. Several wall paintings survive from the palace at Knossos, albeit in a rather ruinous state. Many have been heavily restored, with the lost areas filled in by modern reconstruction. Unfortunately, only a fraction of what originally must have existed remains.

Many Minoan wall paintings reveal the impor­tance of the sea to this island civilization, which had lucrative trading contacts with the Greek mainland, Egypt, and the Near East. The Young Fisherman with His Catch is from the site of Akrotiri on the island of Thera—today, Santorini—a Minoan outpost north of Crete. A violent volcanic eruption around 1620 b.c. destroyed Thera, but many murals from Akrotiri were fortunately preserved in the volcanic ash.

The Minoan peoples traded with the Greek mainland, Egypt and the Near East. They were certainly skilled seafarers. The boats shown here are part of a larger frieze. The attention paid to the details of the boat design and the awareness of the different tasks carried out by the crew members in this mural reveal that the designers of these murals were certainly very knowledgeable when it came to boats. Dolphins, along with other aquatic creatures, are found frequently in Minoan art.

A frieze of boats is also preserved from the same site. The careful attention paid to portraying the different types of boats and the various tasks performed by crew mem­bers reveals that the makers of these murals belonged to the seafaring world they depicted. We know little about the religious practices of the Minoan civilization. The many images of women found in tombs and shrines suggest that the chief deities may have been goddesses. A wall painting from the palace at Knossos shows an elegant woman, possibly a priestess participating in a religious ceremony. The profile view of her face, combined with the large frontal eye, is similar to the treatment of figures in the ancient Near East and Egypt.

Minoan religious practices remain somewhat obscure. This enigmatic scene may be a religious ritual in which male and female participants (females are fair-skinned, as in Egyptian art, indicating their sheltered lives out of the sun) take turns vaulting over a charging bull. The grace, elegance and rhythmic playfulness of both the bull and the bull-jumpers, achieved with curvy, elastic lines, is characteristic of Minoan style.

Perhaps the most famous Minoan mural is one called Bull Jumping, from the palace at Knossos. It is not clear in what context this activity is taking place, although it may be part of a religious ceremony in which male and female acrobats take turns vaulting over a bull. The thin-waisted, elegant, stylized figures with flowing curls are quite different from any of the figures seen in either Egyptian wall paintings or Mesopotamian figural representations, though, despite their energetic outdoor activity, the females have the conventionally lighter skin colour common in Egyptian painting. The weightlessness and playfulness of the bull-jumpers are the antithesis of the timelessly dignified pharaohs adorning Egyptian tombs, while the wonderfully elongated and curved body of the bull, with its long, graceful horns, resembles some of the abstracted animal forms found in paintings and relief sculptures of the ancient Near East. Also of note is the decorative border that frames the scene, serving to complement the rhythmic motion of the bull-jumper.

Several stellar examples of painted Minoan pottery, produced in workshops in the palace complexes, have survived. A vase from Phaistos, Crete, displays bold swirling white and brown patterns on a black background, a less disciplined, more organic design than that found on the beaker from Susa.