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Campbell's Soup I and Campbell's Soup Cans II

In late 1961, Warhol began to learn the process of silkscreening from Floriano Vecchi, who had run the Tiber Press since 1953. Though the process generally begins with a stencil drawing, it often evolves from a blown-up photograph that is then transferred, with glue, onto silk. In either case, one needs to produce a glue-based version of a positive two-dimensional image (positive means the open spaces that are left are where the paint will appear). Usually, the ink is rolled across the medium so that it passes through the silk and not the glue. After the 1961 Christmas season ended, Vecchi, over the course of multiple visits, advised Warhol on how to refine his pigments and to use better squeegee techniques. In 1962, Warhol's silk-screen printmaking techniques were also influenced by Manhattan graphic-art business owner Max Arthur Cohn. It took Warhol until August 1962 to refine his technique of applying the paint with a rubber squeegee through the porous screen. Campbell's Soup cans were among Warhol's first silkscreen productions; the first were U.S. dollar bills. The pieces were made from stencils; one for each color. Warhol did not begin to convert photographs to silkscreens until after the original series of Campbell's Soup cans had been produced. Within 3 months, he was mass-producing silkscreens on various subjects, including Campbell's Soup cans. In 1967, Warhol created Factory Additions, a company for printmaking and publishing. According to Christopher Andreae of The Christian Science Monitor, Warhol produced two different 10-screenprint sets of Campbell's Soup cans in volumes of 250, one in 1968 and one in 1969.

On April 7, 2016, seven Campbell's Soup Cans prints were stolen from the Springfield Art Museum. The FBI announced a $25,000 reward for information about the stolen art pieces from the " Campbell's Soup I " set. They were a part of 1 of 250 sets of 10 screen prints that Warhol ordered in 1968, which had been donated to the museum in 1985 (by The Greenberg Gallery in St. Louis) and which were on display for the first time since 2006. Each of the screen prints had an estimated value of $30,000 ($ 38087 in 2023), according to Artnet author Blake Gopnik. A National Public Radio source estimates that they generally sold for up to $45,000 ($ 57130 in 2023), but the tomato soup version could sell for $100,000 ($ 126955 in 2023). They were insured as a set and the insurance company paid $750,000 ($ 952163 in 2023), once the museum turned over the remaining three screen prints.

When the Art Gallery of Ontario acquired a full Campbell's Soup I set in 2017, it became the first set in a public collection in Canada. On November 8, 2022, climate-change protesters glued themselves to and vandalised another version of the "Campbell's Soup I" set that was on display at the National Gallery of Australia. An edition of the second set, Campbell's Soup Cans II is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The Museum of Modern Art also has one of these sets. In 2013, Hot Dog Bean soup from this set sold for $258,046 ($ 337524 in 2023) in Vienna.