Campbell's Soup Cans - Variations

Variations

Big Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot), 1962. This is similar to the $11.8 Million 2006 sale and similar to the 1970 record setting sale.

Warhol followed the success of his original series with several related works incorporating the same theme of Campbell's Soup cans subjects. These subsequent works along with the original are collectively referred to as the Campbell's Soup cans series and often simply as the Campbell's Soup cans. The subsequent Campbell's Soup can works were very diverse. The heights ranged from 20 inches (510 mm) to 6 feet (1.8 m). Generally, the cans were portrayed as if they were freshly produced cans without flaws. Occasionally, he chose to depict cans with torn labels, peeling labels, crushed bodies, or opened lids like those in the images in this section. Sometimes he added related items like a bowl of soup or a can opener, such as the one in the image on the right. Sometimes he produced images of related items without any soup cans such as Campbell's Tomato Juice Box (above right), which are not strictly a part of the series although a part of the theme. Many of these works were produced at his famous studio "The Factory."

Irving Blum made the original thirty-two canvases available to the public through an arrangement with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC by placing them on permanent loan two days before Warhol's death. However, the original Campbell's Soup Cans is now a part of the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. A print called Campbell's Soup Cans II is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. 200 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962 (Acrylic on canvas, 72 inches x 100 inches), in the private collection of John and Kimiko Powers is the largest single canvas of the Campbell's Soup can paintings. It is composed of ten rows and twenty columns of numerous flavors of soups. Experts point to it as one of the most significant works of pop art both as a pop representation and as conjunction with immediate predecessors such as Jasper Johns and the successors movements of Minimal and Conceptual art. The very similar 100 Cans from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery collection is shown above on the left. The earliest soup can painting seems to be Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato Rice), a 1960 ink, tempera, crayon, and oil canvas.

Campbell's Soup with Can Opener, 1962. Another variation of the originals.

In many of the works, including the original series, Warhol drastically simplified the gold medallion that appears on Campbell's Soup cans by replacing the paired allegorical figures with a flat yellow disk. In most variations, the only hint of three-dimensionality came from the shading on the tin lid. Otherwise the image was flat. The works with torn labels are perceived as metaphors of life in the sense that even packaged food must meet its end. They are often described as expressionistic.

By 1970, Warhol established the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist with a $60,000 sale of Big Campbell's Soup Can with Torn Label (Vegetable Beef) (1962) in a sale at Parke-Bernet, the preeminent American auction house of the day (later acquired by Sotheby's). This record was broken a few months later by his rival for the artworld's attention and approval, Lichtenstein, who sold a depiction of a giant brush stroke, Big Painting No. 6 (1965) for $75,000.

In May 2006, Warhol's Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) (1962) sold for $11,776,000 and set the current auction world record for a painting from the Campbell Soup can series. The painting was purchased for the collection of Eli Broad, a man who once set the record for the largest credit card transaction when he purchased Lichtenstein's "I … I'm Sorry" for $2.5 million with an American Express card. The $11.8 million Warhol sale was part of the Christie's Sales of Impressionist, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art for the Spring Season of 2006 that totaled $438,768,924.

The broad variety of work produced using a semi-mechanized process with many collaborators, Warhol's popularity, the value of his works, and the diversity of works across various media and genre have created a need for the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board to certify the authenticity of works by Warhol.