The Assembly

Magazine

Starr Figura

Aug 4, 2023

The Campbell’s Soup Cans marked the onset of a remarkably productive and auspicious year for Andy Warhol. Among the extraordinary series he developed over the rest of 1962 and into 1963 were the paintings known as the Marilyns, the Elvises, and the Death and Disasters. In them Warhol continued to pursue the strategy of serial repetition, whether through the creation of multiple canvases as variations on the same theme or as a single canvas gridded with repeated images. In making these and other paintings that year he struck on a new medium, silkscreen (also known as screenprint), that amplified the mechanical implications of his art. It immediately became his signature technique.

Warhol had made the 32 panels of Campbell’s Soup Cans painstakingly by hand, using a projector to enlarge the logo that appeared on the Campbell Soup Company’s envelopes and then tracing it. With the pencil lines as his guide, he filled in the outlined shapes with acrylic paint (a medium then associated with commercial work, as opposed to the “fine” art of oil painting) and used a rubber stamp to apply the rows of gold fleurs-de-lis at the bottom of each can. Though there are a few subtle discrepancies in the red and white tones and the gold stamps and medallions, Warhol was careful to maintain an exceptional uniformity among the canvases and to minimize the visibility of brushstrokes or other signs of his own hand.

Having laboriously handcrafted those 32 nearly identical works, he wanted to find a more efficient method for replicating images. He tried using stencils as an aid in a few Soup Can paintings he made shortly thereafter, including 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, a single canvas in which he consolidated the principle of repetition into a large grid. He also tried rubber stamping an entire canvas, which allowed for small motifs to be repeated endlessly [see right]. But this was still very labor-intensive and felt, as he later remarked, “homemade.”1

Andy Warhol. S&H Green Stamps. 1962. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas

Andy Warhol. Double Elvis. 1963. Silkscreen ink and acrylic on canvas

Silkscreening, a commercial technique for printing wallpaper and fabric, was faster and freer, more mechanical and impersonal than any of those other methods of applying paint. Warhol would have been familiar with its applications in fashion and advertising, and he had also been exposed to it as an art medium in the 1940s, when he saw an exhibition of WPA artists who used it, exceptionally, to make prints. The aesthetic of silkscreen is industrial—flat, colorful, and hard-edged—but it is malleable enough to allow for variable colors and subtle shifts in registration from one copy to the next. It enabled Warhol to finally achieve what he called “an assembly-line effect”.2

Silkscreen also allowed Warhol to incorporate photographic imagery into his work and make celebrities a new focus. His images of movie stars—Troy Donahue, Elizabeth Taylor, and others, in addition to Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley—were typically based on publicity stills from the film industry. “With silkscreening,” Warhol explained, “you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple—quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it.”3

Andy Warhol. Gold Marilyn Monroe. 1962. Silkscreen ink and acrylic on canvas

Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe. 1967. Portfolio of 10 screenprints

The numerous paintings of Monroe that Warhol silkscreened in 1962–63 and the editioned portfolio of 10 screenprints, Marilyn Monroe, that he made in 1967 were all based on the same promotional still for the movie Niagara (1953), which he sometimes cropped to a rectangular bust, sometimes to a more tightly framed square face. Warhol’s Marilyns are depicted in a similar manner to his Campbell’s Soup Cans: free-floating, without any background details or context. Indeed, when Walter Hopps asked the artist how he would describe the Campbell’s Soup Cans, Warhol gave him a funny smile and said, “I think they’re portraits, don’t you?”4 In both series, Warhol effected a quasi-religious, profoundly ironic transfiguration of a consumer product—a can of industrially manufactured soup, a movie star fabricated by the Hollywood publicity machine—to the elevated status of a holy relic or a devotional image. While the Marilyns might seem at first to be more obviously so, the central gold medallions in the Campbell’s labels, repeated 32 times, echo the series of identical halos that Warhol would have seen every Sunday as a boy encircling the heads of the saints on the iconostasis (or screen of icon paintings) at St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church on Saline Street in Pittsburgh. When we call the Soup Cans iconic, we are to some degree being literal.

Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1962. Acrylic with metallic enamel paint on canvas, 32 panels

Painters had long used photographs as a tool, but they typically concealed that fact because it was considered a kind of cheat. With a one-two punch, Warhol brought mass-media photography and commercially purposed silkscreen into “serious” painting. By using techniques of mechanical reproduction (the very techniques through which commercial products were being disseminated and popularized) to depict consumer-oriented subjects, he achieved a provocative marriage of form and content. Affirming his commitment to repetition over uniqueness, populism over elitism, he explained that “mechanical means are today, and using them I can get more art to more people. Art should be for everyone.”5 And in the ultimate rebuke to the Abstract Expressionists’ cult of individual, soul-searching self-expression he declared, “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine.”6

Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 22.

Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 22.

Warhol and Hackett, 22.

Warhol, quoted in Walter Hopps, The Dream Colony: A Life in Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 122.

Warhol, quoted in Douglas Arango, “Underground Films: Art or Naughty Movies,” Movie TV Secrets (June 1967), n.p., cited in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966,” in Kynaston McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 40.

Warhol, quoted in G[ene] R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” Artnews 62, no. 7 (November 1963): 26.

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