Mocked first, then kept together

The Soup Cans were first shown not in New York but in Los Angeles, at the Ferus Gallery, opening 9 July 1962. It was Warhol’s first solo painting exhibition, arranged by the gallery’s director, Irving Blum, who had seen Warhol’s soup-can canvases at his apartment and offered him the show. And the display matched the subject perfectly: the thirty-two canvases were set out in a single row on a narrow shelf or ledge running along the wall, exactly like cans for sale on a grocery-store aisle. The retail display was imported, deadpan, into the gallery. Almost nothing sold; a handful of individual canvases went out, one reserved by the actor Dennis Hopper.

The early verdict was not kind. One critic dismissed Warhol as “either a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan,” a Los Angeles newspaper ran a cartoon mocking the show, and a rival dealer down the block stacked actual Campbell’s cans in his window under a sign that read, in effect, do not be misled, get the original, our low price two for thirty-three cents. The “anyone could do this” reaction was there from the first day, and it is still the honest objection the picture has to answer.

Then Blum did something that decided the picture’s whole future. He thought the thirty-two cans belonged together, as one work, and should never be split up and scattered. So he bought back the few that had sold and purchased the entire set of thirty-two from Warhol. The price was almost nothing: a token $1,000, paid in ten monthly installments of a hundred dollars. It was not a market valuation; it was a handshake to keep the group intact. Blum held the set for decades, eventually placing it on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 1987.

Within a year of the soup cans, Warhol made good on what the paintings had only mimed. He gave up the brush for the silkscreen and moved the work into a studio he called the Factory, where assistants like Gerard Malangapulled the prints alongside him. Warhol said the quiet part out loud: he liked the screen because someone else could reproduce the design as well as he could, and openly wished more people would do his work for him. The soup cans had imitated a machine by hand; the Factory simply became one, and a shared one. The question the cans raised about the artist’s unique touch, Warhol now answered with a workshop.

In 1996, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the intact thirty-two-canvas set (a partial gift from Blum plus a museum purchase, widely reported at around fifteen million dollars for the group), and crucially, it kept them together, just as Blum had insisted. So the journey closes neatly: a grocery commodity, painted by hand in 1962 to look mass-produced, lampooned in a Los Angeles gallery, bought whole for a token thousand dollars to keep it from being dispersed, and now hung as one work in the most famous museum of modern art in the world. The supermarket can that walked into the museum never left. All thirty-two flavors are still on the wall, in their even rank, exactly as many as Campbell’s happened to sell.