Campbell's Soup Cans
Other variations

Warhol followed the success of his original series with several related works incorporating the same theme of Campbell's Soup cans. By 1982 Warhol had painted over 100 renderings of Campbell's Soup cans. 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. Their heights ranged from 20 inches (510 mm) to 6 feet (1.8 m). Occasionally, he chose to depict cans with torn labels, peeling labels, crushed bodies, or opened lids (see image right).

According to the mobile audio tour at The Broad, Warhol produced 6 torn-label Campbell's Soup can paintings. Two of these have resulted in record-setting sales. By 1970, Warhol established the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist with a $60,000 ($ 470746 in 2023) 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). The seller was a young Peter Brant, according to art dealer James Mayor. By some accounts this was an arranged sale rather than an auction. This record was broken a few months later by Warhol's rival for the art world's attention and approval, Lichtenstein, who sold a depiction of a giant brush stroke, Big Painting No. 6 (1965), for $75,000 ($ 588432 in 2023).

In May 2006, Warhol's Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) (1962) sold for $11,776,000 ($ 17.8 million in 2023) 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 work is in the collection at The Broad. 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. Total sales on the night it was auctioned were $143,187,200 ($ 216.41 million in 2023), which was the second highest auction night in history at the time.

When Warhol (with Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, and Mary Inman) exhibited at The American Supermarket exhibition group show at the Bianchini Gallery in 1964, he presented both Campbell's Soup cans screen prints and autographed cans of Campbell's Soup, which he referred to as his "Duchamp number". Warhol signed several cases of soup cans for the exhibition. When Warhol was barraged by fans for soup can signatures, he or his assistants would put Warhol's signature on cans.

200 Campbell's Soup Cans (1962, acrylic on canvas, 72 by 100 inches (182.9 cm × 254.0 cm)), 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 in conjunction with immediate predecessors such as Jasper Johns and the successor movements of Minimal and Conceptual art. It was created as Warhol was developing skills to replace painting and drawing by hand, and he produced the repetitive series with stamps and stencils. Its medium was synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, according to one source. The move to stamps and stencils reduced the flaws, and the subsequent move to silkscreen resulted in a process whose only variations were due to inconsistent mechanics: "leftover ink caking on the bottom of the screens, irregular seepage through the screens, or screens placed imprecisely and inconsistently on the canvas". The earliest soup can painting seems to be Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato Rice), a 1961 ink, tempera, crayon, and oil canvas.

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.

The great 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 genre and media have created a need for the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board to certify the authenticity of works by Warhol.

The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art had one of its Campbell's Soup Cans paintings stolen. It was estimated to have been worth €35,000 (€ 43011 in 2023). The theft occurred in March 2015, but it was not made public until August 2015. In March 2021 in Manhattan, a Campbell's Soup Cans lithograph worth tens of thousands of dollars was stolen from art curator Gil Traub. Although the thief was identified on security video, the artwork was not recovered.
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