Campbell's Soup Cans
Premiere

Warhol sent Blum thirty-two 20-by-16-inch (510 mm × 410 mm) canvases of Campbell's Soup can portraits, each representing a particular variety of the Campbell's Soup flavors available at the time. A postcard dated June 26, 1962, sent by Irving Blum states, "32 ptgs arrived safely and look beautiful. strongly advise maintaining a low price level during initial exposure here". The thirty-two canvases are very similar: each is a realistic depiction of the iconic, mostly red and white Campbell's Soup can silkscreened onto a white background. If they could become lasting, they would recall the time in 1962 when Campbell's had exactly 32 varieties. "So it kind of marks a time", according to Warhol.

The Ferus exhibition opened on July 9, 1962, with Warhol absent and without a formal opening. However, the opening coincided with La Cienega Boulevard 's "Monday Art Walk", which was a popular event. The thirty-two single soup-can canvases were placed in a single line, much like products on shelves, each displayed on narrow individual ledges. The contemporary impact was slight, but the historical impact is considered today to have been a watershed. The gallery audience was unsure what to make of the exhibit. A John Coplans Artforum article, which was in part spurred on by a corresponding display of dozens of soup cans by a nearby gallery with a display advertising them at three for 60 cents ($ 6.04 in 2023), encouraged people to take a stand on Warhol. Another detractor, the nearby Primus Stuart Gallery, stacked a pyramid of real Campbell's Soup cans in the window below a sign that read "Do Not Be Misled. Get the Original. Our Low Price 2 — 0.33¢." ($ 3.32 in 2023). The Los Angeles Times published a cartoon where two characters mocked the artistic impression that the paintings gave. Few actually saw the paintings at the Los Angeles exhibit or at Warhol's studio, but word spread, as controversy and scandal, due to the work's seeming attempt to replicate the appearance of manufactured objects. Extended debate on the merits and ethics of focusing one's efforts on such a mundane commercial, inanimate object kept Warhol's work at the center of art world conversations. The pundits could not believe an artist would reduce art to the equivalent of a trip to the local grocery store. Talk did not translate into monetary success for Warhol. Dennis Hopper was the first of only a half dozen to pay $100 ($ 1007.26 in 2023) for a canvas. Blum decided to try to keep the thirty-two canvases as an intact set and bought back the few sold; only 2 paintings had been taken home and 4 had been put on reserve. This pleased Warhol, who had conceived of them as a set, and he agreed to sell the set for ten monthly $100 installments to Blum. Those payments were twice what Blum was paying in rent at the time. Warhol had passed a milestone with this, his first serious art show. Blake Gopnik describes the result as not "...bad for radical new pictures in an unknown and weirdly repetitive style by an artist with zero name recognition and no local ties." An alternate story, from Blum's business partner Joseph Helman, is that Blum had committed to giving Warhol a commission of $3000 ($ 30217.82 in 2023), based on a $200 ($ 2014.52 in 2023) price-per-canvas; and the final $1000 payment was the result of heated renegotiation.

The exhibition closed on August 4, 1962, the day before Marilyn Monroe 's death. Warhol went on to purchase a Monroe publicity still from the film Niagara, which he later cropped and used to create one of his most well-known works: his painting of Marilyn. Although Warhol continued painting other pop art, including Martinson's coffee cans, Coca-Cola bottles, S&H Green Stamps, and other Campbell's Soup cans, he soon became known to many as the artist who painted celebrities. In October 1963, he returned to Blum's gallery to exhibit Elvis and Liz.

Blum had to buy back a total of 5 or 6 paintings, depending on the source, before paying Warhol for the complete set. He retained possession of the work for over 25 years, generally keeping them in the original special slotted crate, except for the occasional home display in his own dining room.

Although the original exhibition of the set presented them all at the same height on various walls, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) generally presented them in a grid on a single wall (see main image above), except for the 2015 Warhol exhibition that it hosted. Since Blum was not able to hang the paintings in a straight line with the proper spacing and perspective, he installed shelves to make the exhibition spacing and placement easier. Since Warhol gave no indication of a definitive ordering of the collection, the sequence chosen by MoMA (in the picture at the upper right of this article), for the display from their permanent collection, reflects the chronological order in which the varieties were introduced by the Campbell Soup Company, beginning with Tomato, which debuted in 1897, in the upper left. By April 2011, the curators at MoMA had reordered the varieties, moving Clam Chowder to the upper left and Tomato to the bottom of the four rows. Blum had installed them in a 4-row grid when displayed in his own dining room prior to his making them available them for public display.
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