The most successful illustrator who wanted to be an artist
By 1960, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was one of the most sought-after commercial artists in New York. Through the 1950s he had drawn shoes for department stores, illustrated advertisements and record sleeves, and won awards for it, work that paid extremely well and that the fine-art world did not take seriously at all. Commercial art and fine art were two separate countries with a guarded border, and Warhol was a rich, successful citizen of the wrong one. What he wanted was to cross over: to hang in a gallery, to be an artist, not an illustrator-for-hire.
The problem was subject matter. The reigning American art of the moment was Abstract Expressionism (the heroic, gestural abstraction of painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning), where the whole value of a canvas was the record of one artist’s unrepeatable hand and inner storm. Warhol’s gift ran the opposite way: he was flat, cool, impersonal, a man who could reproduce a label without leaving a fingerprint. So he asked friends what he should paint, and the famous answer, from a gallery owner named Muriel Latow, was blunt: paint something everybody sees every day, paint money, paint a can of soup.
“The same thing over and over again”
The soup can was not a random object. It was hisobject. When an interviewer later asked Warhol why he had painted Campbell’s soup, he gave one of the great deadpan answers in modern art:
“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.”
That is from his interview with the critic Gene Swenson, published as “What is Pop Art?” in ARTnews in November 1963. (The published interview was edited down from the recordings, so it is the standard, widely-cited version of what Warhol said rather than a raw transcript.) The answer is the whole sensibility in two sentences. No symbolism, no anguish, no deeper meaning offered. He ate the same soup every day for years, and so he painted it, or so the deadpan went. The repetition in his lunch is the repetition in the painting. The picture is not about Campbell’s; in a real way, the picture simply isCampbell’s, the thing he liked, reproduced.