McMuse: - Woodstock School

McMuse:
food in the arts
When Andy Warhol started painting Campbell's soup
cans in 1962, the company sent lawyers along to investigate. Little
did they know, then, what an effect the paintings would have on their
sales, as a new movement in art, Pop Art, was born; and all the experts
could do was watch with bemusement and astonishment, as Andy signed
soup cans and sold them as souvenirs.
For the early paintings Andy used the red and white of the original cans -
but later he incorporated a wide variety of arbitrary colours.
In July 1992, Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed a series
of the Soup Can paintings together for the first time, an exhibition that
was to herald the arrival of Pop Art to the west coast. Until that time a few
of the paintings had been scattered around various New York galleries -
but there had been no formal exhibition in New York. This followed later
that year at the Stable Gallery.
In 1997, the Campbell Soup Company, who had by now acknowledged
the importance of the paintings, sponsored the 'Art of Soup' contest,
which marked the 100th birthday of Campbell's soup and the 35th anniversary
of Warhol's homage to it. The winning design was a sheet of commemorative
postage stamps, each one depicting a different flavour of
Campbell's soup submitted by New Jersey man, Dino Sistilli. He was presented
with a cheque for $10,000 at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Andy Warhol began as a commercial illustrator, and a very successful
one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line
that derived from Ben Shahn. He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962,
when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell's Soup
Cans, 1961-62. From then on, most of Warhol's best work was done over
a span of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it all

flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information,
where most people experience most things at second or third hand
through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated
by repeated again and again and again, there is role
for affectless art.
You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool,
like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Warhol worked this
out; he didn't have to. He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit
for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity -
the famous image of a person, the famous brand name - had
completely replaced both sacredness and solidity. Earlier artists,
like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display
minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color
form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded
by the subtlety of eye and hand.
From American Visions, by Robert Hughes
Various people have taken credit for suggesting to Andy Warhol
that he paint soup cans, according to Gary Comenas at warholstars.org.
The least believable is Ultra Violet's account. Ultra
says that she ran into the yet to be famous Warhol in 1961 at a
luncheonette on 88th and Madison where he was sitting at the
counter eating chicken soup. When she asked him what he did,
he said he painted. She asked him what he painted and Warhol
supposedly responded, "Not much. I'm looking for ideas."
Pointing to the Campbell soup cans on a shelf, she supposedly
said: "Why don't you paint a soup can," to which Andy responded,
"hmm...."
The problem with Ultra Violet's "personal" recollections is that

they often seem be based on other people's published
accounts of the era. Warhol did not spend
much time with Ultra and she was never really a
part of the druggy culture of the Factory regulars
as she did not take drugs, herself.
According to Ted Carey (who was one of Andy
Warhol's commercial art assistants from approximately
1957 through the early 1960s), it was
Muriel Latow who suggested the idea for both the
soup cans and Warhol's early dollar paintings.
Muriel was an interior decorator with higher aspirations who had
an art gallery (the Latow Gallery) in the East 60s. She told Warhol
he should paint "Something you see every day and something
that everybody would recognize. Something like a can
of Campbell's Soup." Ted Carey, who was there at the time,
said that Warhol responded, "Oh that sounds fabulous." According
to Carey, Warhol went out to the supermarket the following
day and bought a case of "all the soups", which Carey saw
when he stopped by Warhol's apartment the next day.
Another assistant, Vito Giallo, who worked for Warhol in 1958/59,
remembers that Warhol always had soup for lunch - "tomato
soup was his favourite" - which Warhol would eat "watching
TV at the same time... His [Warhol's] mother was there to
make soup and a sandwich. Lettuce, tomato sandwiches,
very simple."