Andy Warhol - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, October 24, 2023 | Phillips
  •  “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.”
    —Andy Warhol 

     

    Andy Warhol engaged with art in a radically unembellished way, whilst simultaneously endowing modern art history with a newfound complexity. This surprising simplicity, unburdened by traditional understandings of ‘high art’ and instead informed directly by the pedestrian everyday, is perhaps best exemplified in the Campbell’s Soup screenprints. As the most recognizable piece of Andy Warhol’s exploration of collective consciousness, they are the template through which an entire tradition of Pop Art is derived.  

     

    Since its art world debut, the series has been enshrined with myth and intrigue. While its origin-story is disputed, one famous account narrates how Warhol, feeling rejected from the art world, enlisted the help of his confidant and aspiring art dealer, Muriel Latow (1931 - 2003). Eager to help her distressed friend, Lutow suggested that he should paint “something you see every day and that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell’s Soup.” The following day, Warhol (or in other versions his mother), headed to the Finast Supermarket to purchase the product — one for each flavor. Whether this account may be taken as fact or fiction remains a mystery; however, it is revelatory of the work’s sheer power in creating and directing pivotal dialogues within mass culture.

     

    Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup continue to inspire and direct our collective tastes. In 2012, the Warhol Foundation partnered with the Campbell Soup Company to celebrate fifty years since the series’ debut. In line with the artist’s belief that “art shouldn’t be for the select few” but for “the mass of the American people,” limited-edition cans of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup were sold at $.75 in Target supermarkets across the United States. In all their simplicity, Warhol’s Soup Cans are a wonderful contradiction. Their medium and theme subverts the idea of the artist as an original creator. At the same time, they also served to construct the cult image of Andy Warhol, who, as it so happens, ate soup for lunch every day.  

     

     

    • Literature

      Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann IIIA.5

    • Artist Biography

      Andy Warhol

      American • 1928 - 1987

      Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.

      Working as an artist, but also director and producer, Warhol produced a number of avant-garde films in addition to managing the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine. A central figure in the New York art scene until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol was notably also a mentor to such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

       

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Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

118

Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) (F. & S. IIIA.5)

circa 1978
Screenprint, on Mowhawk Superfine paper, with full margins.
I. 29 3/4 x 17 in. (75.6 x 43.2 cm)
S. 45 1/8 x 35 1/8 in. (114.6 x 89.2 cm)

A rare unpublished proof (there was no edition), with the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Visual Arts Foundation inkstamps on the reverse, initialed 'VF' by Vincent Fremont of the Andy Warhol Foundation and annotated 'UP 47.73' in pencil on the reverse, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$30,000 - 50,000 

Sold for $69,850

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 24-26 October 2023