WARHOL, Andy

1966

screenprint

24 x 17 in.

Like Henry Fords Model Ts at the beginning of the 20th century, Warhol in the later years, created art as mass production. Printmakers in Europe from the late 15th century have been printing identical impressions from the same plate or stone, often in studios with some (or many) assistants. But Warhol in his New York studio called The Factory transformed this process into multiples comparable to Fords system of mass production. Warhol chose the Campbells soup can image as an icon, not for veneration, like a Byzantine Madonna, but as an acknowledgement of a dominant (or the dominant) character of 20th-century culture. The soup that had once been produced in a family kitchen by loving hands for immediate consumption is now manufactured efficiently by anonymous white-gloved workers to be shipped all over the western world and stored for eventual consumption. It may not taste so good but its cheap, dependable, and convenient. Visually this can appears without any setting establishing no time or place. Culturally it is an impersonal product of modern industrialized society. Printed on a sack usable for groceries, it might seem utilitarian. But mounted on a blank background and with a discrete reference to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston it is clearly intended primarily as a comment on our culture. This edition was given in honor of John Bommer (1957-1986) who received an MFA at UCSB in 1983 as John B. Murphy II. He was already an accomplished painter but his life was cut short by AIDS before the development of effective treatment. Alfred Moir Professor Emeritus History of Art and Architecture

1966

WARHOL, Andy

United States, 1927 - 1987

Gift of Gary H. Brown in Memory of John Bommer
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

1999.38