Abdul Rahman Habib wrote
Saturday, May 13, 2023 03:18 PM
The Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art in New York displays Andy and Rahul’s work of art “Ketchup and Soup Can”, drawn during the sixties with graphite materials on paper and signed in 1962 by the American artist, at a price ranging between one million and one million and 500 thousand dollars. He received an offer to buy eight hundred thousand dollars before the end of the contemporary art auction. Through clever line design and instantly recognizable typography, the work delightfully displays American consumerism with lines that rise to icon status thanks to Andy Warhol’s visual depictions of graphite.
Campbell’s Tomato/Ketchup is one of the first examples of Andy Warhol’s 1962 Campbell’s Soup Can drawings, which eventually appeared in Warhol’s remarkable exhibition of 32 panels of Campbell’s Soup Cans at the famous Frost Gallery in Los Angeles later that year.
Other Limited Edition 1962 Graphite examples featuring Campbell’s Soup can remain in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and are intended here to provide an index of American culture and a testament to Warhol’s potential and long-term influence on pop music in the 1960s and beyond.
-Although Warhol would return to Campbell’s Soup periodically throughout his career—briefly in 1965, and then as part of his Retrospectives and Reflections in the 1970s—it was during 1961 and 1962 that he presented the subject in its boldest conceptual manifestation.
Soup’s brilliant recasting visually demonstrates Warhol’s conceptual take on the instantly recognizable person and anonymously made. As Warhol’s first true subject, the artist’s early Campbell’s Soup paintings and drawings effectively launched his career. With humble beginnings as a Warhol lunchbox from his Catholic upbringing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the can is now a popular product of American consumerism, mainly due to Warhol.
When Andy Warhol was asked in 1963 why he chose to paint such a popular subject as Campbell’s soup cans, he bluntly said, “I drank it. I used to eat the same lunch every day for 20 years, the same thing over and over again.”
