Warhol could not quite go there at first: Even to him, the Gunther Jaeckel window paintings clearly seemed too purely commercial to make an easy transition into high culture. Warhol made new riffs on his other Gunther Jaeckel canvases, crafting a picture that zoomed in more closely on Popeye and others that added Batman and Dick Tracy to his cast of colorful superheroes. He was working toward the aesthetic that would go on to win him national recognition, but he was still some ways from earning that.
Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist were starting to enjoy similar success with their paintings derived from comic books and billboards. But the reproduction was really an advertisement for Warhol himself, as possibly the newest of the New Talents the magazine was promoting.
She was a flamboyant decorator, three years younger than Warhol, and had hopes of becoming a serious art dealer. The whole story sounds as apocryphal as most of the other origin stories connected to Warhol—except that one biographer claims to have seen the actual check Warhol wrote to Latow.
He got his old boyfriend Ed Wallowitch, a skilled photographer, to give him shots of soup cans in every state: pristine and flattened, closed and opened, single and stacked.
And then, for something like the following year, the front room at the top of his town house saw him meticulously hand-painting those products onto canvases of every size.
And Warhol himself had grown up with Campbell's soup. People had no idea what to make of art that was so different from everything that art was supposed to be.
For one thing, Irving Blum, one of the owners of Ferus Gallery, chose to display the paintings on narrow shelves running the length of the gallery, not unlike a supermarket aisle. In fact, what little response that came from either the public or art critics could be harsh.
A cartoon in the Los Angeles Times lampooned the paintings and their supposed viewers. Get the Original. Our Low Price — Two for 33 Cents. Despite it all, Blum managed to sell five paintings—mostly to friends, including actor Dennis Hopper. But even before the show closed, he did an abrupt about-face. For one thing, they made art fun. How hard could it be to understand a painting when the original was probably on your kitchen shelf?
His reputation continued to rise. The first time that the Latow version was published was in an essay by Calvin Tomkins, Raggedy Andy , in Tomkins does not credit the story to Carey but doesn't indicate where his information came from. Could it be that Carey was simply repeating a story he had read in Tomkins' account when Patrick Smith interviewed him Carey in ? Or had he given Tomkins the information in the first place?
If Latow came up with the idea for the money paintings on the evening of 23 November - when Warhol wrote his cheque to her - why did he wait four months before he started working on the paintings?
In Carey's version, Latow's main idea was the money idea not the soup can idea - the soup cans were added as an afterthought, yet Warhol went straight out and bought the cans of soup rather than beginning the money paintings in Carey's account. And what about the exhibitions Carey mentions as occurring around the time the soup can idea was supposedly first brought up? None of the exhibitions took place prior to 23 November.
It's possible that Carey was confusing an earlier uptown version of Oldenburg's store which opened on 25 May at the Martha Jackson Gallery with the downtown version which opened 1 December It's also possible that the Rosenquist paintings he saw at the Green Gallery were exhibited in the gallery prior to the opening of Rosenquist's solo show on 30 January Yet Carey is very specific, at least in regard to the Oldenburg show, saying "I remember that right about this time that Oldenburg was having an exhibition downtown in "The Store" and claims that it was the evening of the day that he and Warhol visited "The Store" that Latow came up with the soup can idea.
Oldenburg, himself, had previously exhibited at the Judson gallery as early as He had a solo show at the same venue in May-June and was part of the "Judson Group" that exhibited there in October which again included Wesselmann, along with Jim Dine.
There was another Oldenburg-Dine show in November-December and during the following year Dine's "House" and Oldenburg's "Street" environments were installed there.
Warhol could also have been exposed to the new art at the ground-breaking "New Forms - New Media" show at the Martha Jackson Gallery in The show was divided into two parts with the first taking place June 6 - 24, and the second part from September 28 - October 22, Hess that appeared in the summer issue of Art News :.
From Thomas R. It assembles free-standing works and reliefs made of sponge, wood pegs, tacks, a smashed fender, folded paper, ping-pong balls, playing cards, spikes, a stuffed chicken, a cut-out bird, tar, garter-belts, coffee-grounds, a railroad tie, styrofoam, polyesters, corrugate, pillows, an electro-magnet - rubbish and valuables, 'garlic and sapphires in the mud Not all the works in the exhibition, of course, break with that ambiguous stasis which has been the strength and the purity of the fine arts since long before its definition by Aristotle and which will endure until generations from now But an attack on the aristocracy of art by and with art is the main point of the exhibition - although 'attack' is too aggressive a noun for the witty, ingratiating social activity to which so many of these works are dedicated.
The review is of interest not only because Hess notes the importance and the extent of commonplace objects in the new art, but also because he links it to the Dada movement and expresses surprise that there was no work by "St. Marcel" i. Marcel Duchamp. Warhol's work would also be likened to that of Duchamp. If Warhol had managed to miss all the above exhibitions, he would have at least read about the new art in Life magazine which he was known to read.
He would later use images from Life for paintings such as his Race Riots series and two of his Suicide paintings in To most passerby, these wastelands of waste are only an eyesore. But to a large number of today's artists, they are a gold mine - both of inspiration and of materials. From the exhaust pipes, bedsprings, cans, cartons, bottles, dismembered toys, wheels and other debris of the trash heap, painters and sculptors are fashioning a startling species of contemporary art Whatever the reaction to it, the junk movement is in full flood around the globe.
A colossal assortment of its products is currently touring the U. And even Life was linking the new art to Dada. The article continued, "The origins of junk art go back to some famous - and in their day, infamous - 20th Century pioneers, the cubists and dadaists. The exhibition catalogue featured text by William C.
Seitz, as below. Seitz's use of "neo'" in his text is a reference to the term "neo-dada" which was used to describe the new art until the term "Pop" came into play. It has indeed provided an effective outlet for artists of a generation weaned on abstract expressionism but unwilling to mannerize Pollock, de Kooning, or other masters whom they admire.
Because of their concern for subject matter, painting and sculpture are not their only influences. Many cultivate attitudes that could be labeled 'angry,' 'beat,' or 'sick'; they inherit a malaise shared by authors such as Kaka, Sartre, Beckett, and Ionesco.
Certain of their attitudes are comparable to those of the dada period; but why especially considering the overtone of tired academicism which it can imply is the prefix 'neo' more applicable in that it was in ?
Assemblage has become, temporarily at least, the language for impatient, hyper-critical, and anarchistic young artists With it, or admixtures of it with painting and sculpture, they have give form to content drawn from popular culture: more recent equivalents, as the English critic Reyner Banham argues, of Boccioni's love of 'all anti-art manifestations of our epoch - cafe-chantant, gramophone, cinema, electric advertising, mechanistic architecture, skyscrapers..
If Warhol needed any further evidence that a new movement of art had begun based on "content drawn from popular culture" and that, still being without a dealer, he was missing out on it he needed only to have looked at the following week's issue of Life which featured the annual Carnegie International Exhibition of Art in his home town of Pittsburgh.
Again the show focused on the new art, with photographs of the art taken in Schenley Park presumably not far from Schenley High School where Warhol had been a student and on the grounds of Warhol's alma mater, Carnegie Tech.
Photos in the Life article included this one of Number 10, left by British artist William Turnbull juxtaposed against real archery targets on the campus of Andy Warhol's alma mater, Carnegie Tech.
As if to rub salt into the wound, one of the people whose art was pictured in the Life article was Warhol's instructor at the university, Robert Lepper, who had used found objects "assorted metal parts from cars and compressors" to create a work titled Engine. Also included was a photograph of Number 10, by British artist William Turnbull.
The new figurative art movement was apparently international. It was amongst the Independent Group members that "some of the earliest stirrings of Pop in England, and the coining of the term in the late s, took place," according to art writer Marco Livingstone.
The pop art of today, the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and flower arrangement, the pictures of second rank of all Renaissance schools, and the plates that first presented to the public the Wonder of the Machine Age and the New Territories, is to be found in today's glossies bound up with the throw-away object.
Although it is tempting to think that the Smithsons' article was one of the influences that caused Warhol to use advertising imagery in his early pre- Soup Can paintings, it is improbable but not impossible that he saw the article. The magazine that contained it, Ark , was published by the Royal College of Art in London but had subscribers in 32 countries. Warhol might also have seen news of group shows in the U. The main difference between the Smithsons' British "pop art" and the Americans' still yet to be named "Pop Art," was that the Smithsons referred to the "glossies bound up with the throw-away object" in a derogatory fashion whereas in the U.
The screen idols in "today's glossies" became artistic icons and the "throw-away object became "junk art. Often the found images or objects harked back to the past. John Chamberlain is quoted in the Life magazine article on junk art as saying that he preferred using car parts that have "a look of history" for his car crash sculptures and Robert Rauschenberg is quoted as saying his assemblages are more about "yesterday's going-on than today's.
Although he used contemporary imagery for his Soup Cans , the design of the can was the same as it had been the previous decades and Warhol said that he painted it, not because it was a modern icon of capitalism, but because it reminded him of his past - as a child he had eaten soup everyday. One reviewer of the famous Soup Can show at the Ferus Gallery picked up on the nostalgia element of the paintings:.
Warhol obviously doesn't want to give us much to cling to in the way of sweet handling, preferring instead the hard commercial surface of his philosophical cronies. But then house fetishes rarely compete with Rembrandt in esthetic significance.
However, based on formal arrangements, intellectual and emotional response, one finds favourites. Mine is Onion. But if Warhol painted the soup cans because he ate soup everyday as a child, could Carey's story that Latow had come up with the idea, still be true? There was one other person present that evening - Carey's lover, John Mann. But according to Mann, Warhol painted the Campbell's Soup Cans not because he liked soup, but because he hated it. Muriel, he said, began by feeling Warhol out, asking him what he liked and, at one point, what he disliked.
According to Mann, "If you asked Andy a question like that you got a pretty flippant answer, something off the top of his head. And as I recall, he said, 'I hate grocery shopping. Warhola often asked Andy to run across the street for groceries.
It was all very languid and flip on Andy's part. Before long, they got to Campbell's soup and Andy said he hated that, too. He said that his mother made it every day for lunch and after all those years, it was like, 'Oh, Mom - again?
Which particular Campbell's soups, Latow asked, did Andy dislike? All of them, he said. In that case, suggested Latow, why not run over, buy one of each and paint them all This is considerably different than Carey's version of the same evening. Andy was driving him and Mann nuts, said Ted.
He wouldn't stop asking them where Muriel was; he wanted to pick her brain. In a rotten mood herself - her gallery was going out of business - Latow joined Ted and John for dinner. Latow insisted that he write the cheque first. As Latow recalled, she asked him to think of the most common, everyday, instantly recognizable thing he could. Something like a Campbell's soup can - in fact, why not a Campbell's soup can?
He could paint it in various permutations. His one question, Latow said, was 'How big? According to Carey, "the next day Andy went out to the supermarket because we went by the next day , and we came in, and had a case of every Carey's account of the evening did not mention that Warhol was concerned about the size of the paintings, as Latow mentioned, and Warhol's most famous Campbell's Soup Cans - the Ferus-style cans - were quite modest in size - 20" x 16". Otherwise, her account generally agrees with Carey's account except that she doesn't mention the money idea or at least is not quoted about the money idea.
She also doesn't mention that Warhol didn't like soup, as Mann suggested. Mann's claim that Warhol hated soup also conflicted with other accounts by people who knew him. One of Warhol's assistants during the s, Vito Giallo, recalls that Warhol always had soup for lunch. According to Giallo, Warhol's favourite flavour of soup was tomato which he Warhol would eat while "watching TV at the same time. Lettuce, tomato sandwiches, very simple.
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