THE ORIGIN OF ANDY WARHOL'S SOUP CANS
G. Comenas (London, 2003/2008)
Robert Indiana: "I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup." (NY Times 12/1/02)
Marcel Duchamp: "If you take a Campbell's Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not intrested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell's Soup cans on a canvas." (PT148)
Andy Warhol used soup cans as subject matter at various stages of his career. In addition to the soup cans of the early 1960s he also produced portfolios of soup can prints in 1968 and 1969. During the mid-1970s soup cans were included in his Reversals and Retrospectives series. In 1985 soup can imagery was again used by him for a series of small silkscreens. (AWM41)
Various people have taken credit for suggesting to Andy Warhol that he paint soup cans. The least believable is Ultra Violet's account. Ultra says that she ran into the yet to be famous Warhol in 1961 at a luncheonette on 88th and Madison where he was sitting at the counter eating chicken soup. When she asked him what he did, he said he painted. She asked him what he painted and, according to Ultra, Warhol responded, "Not much. I'm looking for ideas." Pointing to the Campbell soup cans on a shelf, she supposedly said, "Why don't you paint a soup can," to which Andy supposedly responded, "hmm...." (UV90)
The problem with Ultra Violet's "personal" recollections is that they often seem to be based on other people's published accounts of the era. In her autobiography, Famous For 15 Minutes, she warns the reader in a disclaimer that "Just as Impressionist painters used strokes of color rather than photographic techniques to portray objects, so I have taken artistic license in conveying both reality and essence in this book." (UV)
Warhol never recalled meeting Ultra Violet at the luncheonette. He thought he first met her when she came by the Factory to buy a painting. (POP)
According to Ted Carey (who was one of Andy Warhol's commercial art assistants in the late fifties), it was Muriel Latow who suggested the idea for both the soup cans and Warhol's early dollar paintings.
Muriel was an interior decorator with higher aspirations who had an art gallery (the Latow Gallery) in the East 60s. She told Warhol he should paint "Something you see every day and something that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell's Soup." Ted Carey, who was there at the time, said that Warhol responded, "Oh that sounds fabulous." According to Carey, Warhol went out to the supermarket the following day and bought a case of "all the soups", which Carey saw when he stopped by Warhol's apartment the next day. (PS257)
Another assistant, Vito Giallo, who worked for Warhol in 1958/59, remembers that Warhol always had soup for lunch - "tomato soup was his favorite" - which Warhol would eat "watching TV at the same time... His [Warhol's] mother was there to make soup and a sandwich. Lettuce, tomato sandwiches, very simple." (UW20)
Gerard Malanga would sometimes go to Andy's house for lunch during the pre-Factory days when they were operating out of a vacated firehouse and he does not mention soup in his description of lunch at Warhol's home: "After work was completed, we would go over to Andy's house. The firehouse was three blocks from where Andy lived with Julia, his mother... She would make lunch for us, which usually consisted of a Czechoslovak-style hamburger stuffed with diced onion, sprinkled with parsley, and always on white bread, and with a 7-Up on ice." (GMW32).
In an interview for the Face magazine in London in 1985, David Yarritu asked Warhol about flowers that Warhol's mother made from tin cans. In his response, Warhol mentioned them as a reason for doing his first tin can paintings:
David Yarritu: I heard that your mother used to make these little tin flowers and sell them to help support you in the early days.
Andy Warhol: Oh God, yes, it's true, the tin flowers were made out of those fruit cans, that's the reason why I did my first tin-can paintings...You take a tin-can, the bigger the tin-can the better, like the family size ones that peach halves come in, and I think you cut them with scissors. It's very easy and you just make flowers out of them. My mother always had lots of cans around, including the soup cans. (FA50)
Although Muriel Latow's suggestion to Warhol that he paint a soup can may have spurred him into action, it was only natural that Warhol would choose an image to paint that he had been surrounded by in his youth. When the art critic G.R. Swenson asked him in 1963 why he painted soup cans, he replied, "I used to drink it, I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years." (AN)
Ronald Tavel, the scriptwriter for Warhol's early films, later recalled that "When a friend of Andy's, Aaron Fine, dying of cancer in September 1962, inquired why he chose to depict the Campbell's soup can, Andy answered, 'I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it." (http://ronald-tavel.com/pdf/012.pdf)
Gary Comenas
Warholstars