Soup-y Sales

"I think everybody should like everybody."

            Clam Chowder, Chicken Noodle, Cream of Vegetable, Onion, Green Pea, Scotch Broth, Vegetable, Split Pea, Vegetable Beef, Bean, Cheddar Cheese, Tomato Rice, Beef, Cream of Asparagus, Cream of Celery, Black Bean, Turkey Noodle, Beef Broth, Chicken Gumbo, Turkey Vegetable, Chili Beef, Vegetable Bean, Cream of Chicken, Cream of Mushroom, Pepper Pot, Chicken, Consomme, Tomato, Minestrone, Chicken Vegetable, Beef Noodle, and Vegetarian Vegetable.

            "Campbell's Soup Cans." All 32 varieties. 1962. Warhol.

            These were the stars of his first solo show at a gallery in Los Angeles in July that year. Purchase price for each 20x16-inch silkscreened-and-painted work: $100. An art gallery down the street mocked him, offering real soup cans—two for 33 cents.

            Of the show, the art critic at The Los Angeles Times wrote "This young 'artist' is either a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan." The New Yorker's ruling? "Narcotic reiteration…a joke without humor."

Vogue Sniffed

            The air of banality is suffocating," said one critic. Another believed Warhol's work's contemporary nature "may render [him] unintelligible and thus obsolete in the future." Vogue sniffed "weak ways of seeing and feeling." Time Magazine deemed his art "Excruciatingly monotonous, [and] the apparently  senseless repetition does have the jangling effect of the syllabic babbling of an infant."

            Only six of the works sold. The gallery owner bought them back. Years later he sold the complete collection to the Museum of Modern Art for $15 million.

            "I like boring things," Warhol once said. It took guts to make and show art like "Campbell's Soup Cans."

            A professionally trained commercial illustrator, Warhol was, during the 1950s, at the top of his game in Manhattan doing fashion and shoe illustrations for top department stores and fashion magazines. He wanted more. He wanted to make his mark on history.

"Precisely Nowhere"

            Before his breakthrough in 1962, he tried three times to get a show at one New York City gallery. Each time the gallery rejected his delicate line drawings of young men French kissing. In 1956, he did have a gallery show—It consisted of drawings of penises. As one critic wrote, such art got him "precisely nowhere." 

            Don't say Warhol didn't have guts.

            He was inept at social relations. He was unable recognize friends. He became famous for his inarticulateness and monosyllabic attempts at conversation. He was obsessed with repetition and uniformity. He stared blankly into space at parties. He always bought the same brand of underpants, and they had to be green.

            "It is fascinating how many of the things he did are typical of autism,' said a British medical expert. "Warhol almost certainly had Asperger syndrome."

            This progenitor of Pop was raised in a Pennsylvania mining town. His parents? Struggling Czech immigrants. His father worked in a coal mine in West Virginia and died when Warhol was 13 from drinking poisoned water. 

            When young Andrew Warhola was in third grade he came down with Sydenham's chorea (St. Vitus Dance), a nerve disorder that causes involuntary movements in the legs and arms. Forced to stay in bed for months, his mother Julia encouraged his interest in art, and he collected pictures of movie stars.

            One special thing his mother did to comfort him was to serve him soup in bed. To Warhol, soup became the quintessence of love. "Mother always served Campbell's soup," said Warhol's brother. "She always had a good supply."

            Then again perhaps soup symbolized hard times to Warhol. Shortly after his father's death, his mother, who later lived with him for years in Manhattan, was diagnosed with colon cancer. Soup may have been almost all he had to eat.

            Perhaps there is another reason Warhol painted soup cans. Prior to those works, he had done a series of images inspired by comic book art, but fellow Manhattan Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein beat him to the punch, winning a show at a prominent gallery with similar works.

            Struggling to think of what to create, Warhol asked a friend who was an interior decorator and gallery owner. She asked him what he loved the most. Warhol's reply, "Money."

            She told him to think of something else, something simple that people see every day. Voila, soup cans. Said Warhol: "I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day for twenty years."

            Or maybe there were other reasons why Warhol did what he did. "I just do art because I'm ugly," he said, "And there's nothing else for me to do."

            Then again, maybe it is as simple as this: "Art," said Warhol, "is what you can get away with.

MORAL: Soup's on.

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