ART GALLERY

Photograph by Robert McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
©2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,Inc./ARS,N.Y./JASPAR,Tokyo E0434

200 Campbell's Soup Cans: This painting, depicting 200 cans of soup stacked perfectly in rows, 20 across and 10 down, calls to mind the arrangement of products on shelves in big suburban supermarkets in the United States. Following World War II, the United States became a symbolic consumption society, with food and other everyday necessities mass-produced and commodified on an industrial scale. The phenomenon spread rapidly from the United States to other countries. Andy Warhol and the Pop artists early caught on to the images and objects that exemplified this social transformation and the new symbolic consumption. 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans is a highly important work as the first of Warhol’s paintings to have the surface entirely filled with the image of neatly arranged repetitive rows of a mass produced product. The painting was exhibited in the 1962 “The New Realists” exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery.