Hand-painted to look mass-produced

In 1962 Warhol painted not one can but thirty-two. The number is not symbolic and it was not chosen for effect: there were thirty-two because that was exactly how many varieties of Campbell’s condensed soup the company sold at the time, from Tomato to Beef to Onion to Pepper Pot. One canvas per flavor on the grocery shelf. The product line set the count, which is itself the joke and the method: Warhol did not compose a number of cans, he transcribed a catalog.

Each canvas is the same modest size, 20 by 16 inches (about 50 by 41 centimeters), and they are separate paintings, thirty-two of them, not one big picture. That separateness matters. They can be hung in any order, and in fact Warhol never fixed a sequence; the museum that owns them now arranges them by the date each soup variety first reached the market (Tomato, the oldest, leading), but that is a curator’s decision, not the artist’s instruction.

The cans are almost always mistaken for silkscreens. They are not, and the correction tells you what the painting is really doing. These 1962 Soup Cans are not silkscreens. Warhol is famous for the silkscreen process (the mechanical stencil printing he used for his Marilyns and his Disasters), but that technique came slightly later in 1962 and after. The Soup Cans are among the last works Warhol made substantially by hand. He projected an image of a real can onto each blank canvas, traced the outline, and painted it in by hand. The little gold band of ornaments around each can’s base he pressed on with a rubber hand stamp.

The strangeness is the point. The whole feeling of the work is mechanical, impersonal, mass-produced, as flat and anonymous as a printed label. And yet Warhol achieved that machine-made look by hand, one careful traced-and-painted can at a time. He was not reproducing a soup can with a machine; he was, painstakingly, by hand, imitating a machine. The deadpan uniformity that reads across the set is a performance of the impersonal, and the performer is a human hand. Which is exactly why that hand still shows, in the small slips from can to can.