Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup Box, 1986, a variation on one of the most iconic images of 20th century art, is re-imagined here in the penultimate year of the artist’s life. Widely recognised as the most influential figure of the Pop Art movement, Warhol radically subverted the violently gestural abstraction of the Post-War period with his elevation of commercial imagery to the realms of fine art. Coming from a Private Collection, the present work is offered for the first time at auction and forms part of a series of silkscreen paintings begun in 1985 utilising the same source image, but rendered in contrasting tonal variations. Signifying the most inconsequential reality and simultaneously withdrawing from and transcending the real, Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup Box is presented at the centre of the canvas, faithfully incorporating the distinctive red brand logo and yellow shade of the pictured noodles contrasted here with acidic pale green and dark blue.
In the early 1960s, Warhol transitioned from a commercial fashion illustrator to a revered, hugely successful artist. The spark to this meteoric rise to fame can be pinpointed to Warhol’s first west coast solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in 1962, where he exhibited Campbell’s Soup Cans: Warhol’s first pictorial series, at a time when its logo was emblazoned on every street corner and magazine in America. The work comprised of 32 individually painted canvases depicting differing varieties of canned soup is now housed in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The idea is said to have been born through a dinner conversation with friend and gallerist Muriel Latow, who suggested 'You should paint something that everybody sees every day, that everybody recognizes... like a can of soup' (Muriel Latow, quoted in Gary Indiana, Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World, New York, 2010, p. 82). Warhol allegedly proceeded to purchase every type of soup offered by the brand and meticulously recreated them. Initially strongly dividing his critics, Warhol’s exhibition is heralded as contributing to the birth of Pop Art in America. Arguably Warhol’s most recognisable subject, the Campbell’s brand is and one that the artist repeatedly returned to over the next two decades.
In contrast to the earlier outrage caused by Warhol’s promotion of everyday household products to fine art objects, in 1985, Warhol was commissioned by Campbell’s to produce a series of paintings of their dry-mixed soups. Warhol’s methods of serial production and the naming of his studio ‘The Factory’ placed his artistic identity as firmly at odds with the historic and romantic notion of The Artist as a lonely creative individual defined by his or her rejection of socially established norms and conventions.
Warhol’s serial technique is often hailed merely as triumphant reaction to mass-produced copy. However, the artist’s late works in particular demonstrate his visual variations as products of his individual strategy. Unlike commercial images, where image selection precedes its mass production, Warhol reproduces a series of unique variations on the same image, altering colours and also in his late works adding depth and additional outlines. The present Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup Box encompasses both the subject matter that launched Warhol’s career and also the stylistic elements central to his later creative oeuvre. Reflecting on his career, Warhol stated 'I should have done the Campbell’s Soups and kept doing them' (Andy Warhol, quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966’, Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes, eds., October Files, London, 2001, p. 30).