Campbell's Tomato Soup

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When Andy Warhol first displayed his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans in 1962, he arranged them on shelves like supermarket products. Warhol chose as his subject a machine-produced and mass-marketed food, screenprinting his image of the commercial product on a functional shopping bag. In doing so, the artist called attention the soup’s dollar value and the way in which it was distributed and purchased. Warhol may have been influenced by his own personal experience; he often commented that he ate Campbell’s soup for lunch every day for twenty years. Warhol, who began as a commercial illustrator, knew how to take advantage of the consumer culture to publicize his art. He designed this shopping bag as a moving advertisement for an exhibition of his art in Boston.

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