Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) For Sale

Campbell’s Soup Can is a screenprint on shopping bag material produced by the artist in 1964. Signed on the front and from an edition of three hundred, this is a rare example of Warhol’s first use of the Campbell Soup Can, an image now synonymous with Pop Art.  

Two years before the present work, Warhol had held his inaugural exhibition ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ at the Ferus Gallery, a ground-breaking show that featured 32 silk-screened canvasses of the item. Familiar to the mass public, the humble soup can broke down the barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. In its this tote printed version, the viewer grapples with the subject of consumption two-fold: a soup can on a shopping bag, which by its very nature holds material goods.  

The work employs Warhol’s favourite method, already discovered at this early stage in his career, screenprinting, that ties into the theme of consumerism the soup can embodies. The saturation of ink on the can and its uniformity is visually alluring and hypnotic. Warhol wrote ‘In August of ‘62, I started doing silkscreens. The rubber-stamp method I'd been using to repeat images suddenly seemed too handmade. I wanted something stronger that would give me more of an assembly-line effect.’ Its very nature enabling the ready reproduction of images with the use of a stencil and ink transfer, Warhol would go on to appropriate some of his best-known imagery, such as a film still of Marilyn Monroe from the film Niagra, purchased directly after the closing of his exhibition ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’, with the method.