The Origins of Andy Warhol's Soup Cans
or The Synthesis of Nothingness
by Gary Comenas

Robert Indiana: "I knew Andy very well. The reason he painted soup cans is that he liked soup." (RI623)

Marcel Duchamp: "If you take a Campbell Soup Can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell soup cans on a canvas." (QU)

Martin Heidegger: "... at bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary."
("The Origin of the Work of Art")

Andy Warhol used soup cans as subject matter at various stages of his career. In addition to the Campbell's Soup Can paintings 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 and in 1985 soup can imagery was again used by him in a series of small silkscreens. (AWM41)

Various people have taken credit for suggesting to Andy Warhol that he paint Campbell's soup cans. According to Ted Carey (a close friend of Warhol during the late 1950s/early 1960s), it was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the ideas for both the soup cans and Warhol's dollar paintings. On 23 November 1961 Warhol wrote Latow a cheque for $50 which, according to the 2009 Warhol biography, Pop, The Genius of Warhol, was payment for coming up with the idea of the soup cans as subject matter. Warhol's first Pop works, including his paintings of comic strip characters complete with speech bubbles, had been displayed as part of a window display at New York's Bonwit Teller department store in April 1961. Later that year Warhol found out that Roy Lichtenstein was also doing comic strip paintings and it would be Warhol's search for new subject matter that would lead him to the soup cans. In Carey's version of events, after he told Warhol about Lichtenstein's comic strip paintings Warhol was convinced that Lichtenstein had got the idea for comic strip paintings from having seen Warhol's comic strip paintings at Bonwit Teller. Carey had seen Lichtenstein's work at the Leo Castelli gallery and "went right over to Andy's house" to tell him about the paintings.

Ted Carey:

"... So, I went home and called Andy - no, I think, I went right over to Andy's house... and so, I said, 'Prepare yourself for a shock.' And he said, 'What?' I said, 'Castelli has a closet full of comic paintings.' And he said, 'You're kidding?!' And he said, 'Who did them?' And I said, 'Somebody by the name of Lichtenstein.' Well, Andy turned white. He said, 'Roy Lichtenstein.' He said, 'Roy Lichtenstein used to... ' - as I remember, he used to be a sign painter for Bonwit Teller... the implication was: Andy felt that Lichtenstein had seen the paintings in the window and gave him the idea to do his paintings. Now, whether this is true or not, I don't know, but at this time, this is what Andy had felt." (PS255)

Lichtenstein later denied that he had any knowledge of Warhol's comic strip paintings prior to doing his own:

Roy Lichtenstein:

"I saw Andy's work at Leo Castelli's about the same time I brought mine in, about the spring of 1961... Of course, I was amazed to see Andy's work because he was doing cartoons of Nancy and Dick Tracy and they were similar to mine." (BE39n.21)

It is unlikely that Lichtenstein saw Warhol's cartoon paintings at Castelli as early as spring 1961 as the gallery did not have any of Warhol's cartoon paintings at that time, but Lichtenstein could have seen them in spring 1961 in the Bonwit Teller department store window. Although Lichtenstein had been using comic book imagery in his paintings since 1957, he did not do paintings of comic strips that featured speech bubbles until he painted Look Mickey. According to art writer Avis Berman, "From the accounts of witnesses, it seems clear that Look Mickey, Lichtenstein's first surviving Pop painting, was executed in mid to late June of 1961." (AV122)

Whether Lichtenstein had seen Warhol's paintings or not, it is clear from both Ted Carey's and Ivan Karp's accounts that Warhol was painting comic strip characters with speech bubbles prior to Lichtenstein and had exhibited them in the very public windows of Bonwit Teller before Lichtenstein began incorporating speech bubbles into his own works. Karp's version of events, however, differs slightly from that of Carey. Karp recalls that he showed Lichtenstein's paintings directly to Warhol at the Castelli gallery and that Warhol was "stunned."

Ivan Karp:

"I was working at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1961... And three people, I think it was, came in one afternoon, which included a very shy, strange-looking gray-haired man [Warhol], and they wanted to see drawings by Jasper Johns... I thought that I would show him [Warhol] a few of the other things in the gallery, and I took out this Roy Lichtenstein painting that was there maybe just the week before. And he reacted in a very stunned and almost a distressed way and saying that he himself was involved with imagery of the same type and was shocked to think somebody else had come upon such an idea of using a cartoon subject for a fine arts arrangement... And, so , he said to me: would I not visit his studio and see what he did... Well, I was so fascinated at the idea that he might be doing the same thing as this strange man Roy Lichtenstein that I went to his studio on 89th Street and Lexington Avenue." (PS350)

In October 1961 Leo Castelli officially signed Lichtenstein to his gallery, paying him a stipend of $400 a month, whereas Warhol was still without a dealer. As Carey put it, "Lichtenstein was being shown by Castelli... [and] was going to get the credit..." (AV132/WC90)

Ted Carey:

"Lichtenstein was being shown by Castelli, which was, like, the Pop gallery. Lichtenstein was going to get the credit. So, all of these paintings that Andy had done, even if they had been done and had been recognized as being done before Lichtenstein, were really going to be anti-climatic. And, I remember that right about this time that Oldenburg was having an exhibition downtown in "The Store" - it was a fabulous store. He just rented a store and just did the whole store in cakes, pies... I mean, it was incredible - and going down there with Andy, and it was just overwhelming and so fabulous that Andy was so depressed. He said, 'I'm so depressed.' And I can remember right about this same time going to the Green Gallery, and I remember I called Andy. I said, 'There's somebody at the Green Gallery called Rosenquist, who's doing paintings, like of a bottle of 7-Up.'" (WC90)

Around the same time, Carey invited Warhol to dinner with himself, Carey's lover John Mann and the gallerist Muriel Latow. Warhol was "too depressed" to go, so Latow, Mann and Carey had dinner without him and visited him at his home afterwards. It was then that Latow came up with idea of the Campbell's Soup Can paintings - as well as the "money" paintings.

Ted Carey:

"... this particular day, after going to the Oldenburg Store, I called him [Warhol] when I got home, and I said 'John, Muriel, and I are having dinner tonight. Do you want to have dinner with us?' And he said, 'No, I'm just too depressed'... so, after dinner we went to Andy's, and he was very depressed. And Muriel was depressed because she was either at this time declaring bankruptcy or was about to declare bankruptcy... And so Andy said, 'I've got to do something.' He said, 'The cartoon paintings... it's too late. I've got to do something that really will have a lot of impact, that will be different enough from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist, that will be very personal, that won't look like I'm doing exactly what they're doing.' And he said, 'I don't know what to do.' 'So,' he said, 'Muriel, you've got fabulous ideas. Can't you give me an idea?' And, so, Muriel said, 'Yes.' 'But,' she said, 'it's going to cost you money.' So Andy said, 'How much?' So she said, 'Fifty dollars.' She said, 'Get your cheque book and write me a cheque for fifty dollars.' And Andy ran and got his cheque book, like, you know, he was really crazy and he wrote out the cheque. He said, 'All right, Give me a fabulous idea.' And so Muriel said, What do you like more than anything else in the world?' So Andy said, 'I don't know. What?' So she said, 'Money' ... And so Andy said, 'Oh, that's wonderful.' So then either that, or, she said, 'you've got to find something that's recognizable to almost everybody. Something you see everyday that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell's Soup.'" (WC90-1)

But if Latow wrote the cheque on November 23rd, it would have been before the opening of Oldenburg's downtown version of his Store on 1 December 1961. Yet Carey says he invited Warhol to dinner with him and Muriel and John on "this particular day, after going to the Oldenburg Store." He also mentions seeing Rosenquist's work at the Green Gallery. Rosenquist's solo exhibition at the Green Gallery didn't open until January 30, 1962. In order to have seen Oldenburg's Store on the day he rang Warhol and to have also gone to the Rosenquist exhibition, Carey's phone call and visit would have had to have been on January 30th or 31st, 1962 (after the Rosenquist show had opened but before the Store had closed), assuming that it was Rosenquist's solo show that Carey was referring to. But one of of Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can paintings is inscribed January 26, 1962 and Warhol's brother, Paul Warhola, recalled being given a Soup Can painting around Christmas 1961. According to Warhol biographer, David Bourdon, the art dealer Allan Stone included a small Campbell's Soup Can painting at his gallery in a group show in December 1961. (RN64)

The above quote by Carey does not exactly inspire confidence in the accuracy of his recollection, particularly the way he says (after mentioning the money painting idea) "So then either that, or, she [Ward] said," before continuing with what Ward was alleged to have said - "you've got to find something that's recognizable to almost everybody. Something you see everyday that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell's Soup." Was Latow's cheque to Warhol a payment for the soup can idea or the money painting idea or both? Although Carey says that Muriel came up with the idea of painting both money and soup cans, the Warhol catalogue raisonné states that "A different account credits the idea of painting money to Eleanor Ward. According to Ward and Emile de Antonio, Ward had promised Warhol a one-person exhibition at Stable Gallery if he would paint her lucky two dollar bill." The statement in the catalogue raisonné is footnoted "Smith 1986, 512; Bockris 1989, 111." This refers to the interview with Eleanor Ward by Patrick Smith in Andy Warhol's Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986) and to a quote by Emile de Antonio in Victor Bockris' biography of the artist. There have been numerous editions of the Bockris book. The current edition is titled Warhol: The Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003). The edition that I have is titled The Life and Death of Andy Warhol and was published in the U.K. in 1998 by Fourth Estate Ltd. In that edition, Bockris quotes de Antonio (on page 150) as saying that he took Ward to Andy's house and said, "Well, come on, look here, Elinor [sic], are you giving Andy a show or not...?" and Ward then "pulled out her lucky two-dollar bill and sort of waved it in his face and she said, 'Andy, it just so happens I have November, which as you know is the best month to show, and if you do a painting of this two-dollar bill for me I'll give you a show.'" Yet, in the actual interview that Ward gave to Smith in the other cited source, Andy Warhol Art and Films, Ward, herself, simply states that "I had given him [Warhol] my lucky two dollar bill to do a painting for the first show" and doesn't say that it was in exchange for putting on an exhibition of his work. (PS512) In the Smith interview Ward credits the idea of doing a Warhol show to her "guardian angel" and indicates that it was John Bedenkapp, not Emile de Antonio, who was with her when she asked Warhol to do the solo exhibition at her gallery.

Eleanor Ward:

"... he [Warhol] was brought into the gallery by De Antonio, and I immediately liked Andy as a person... the gallery was, at that time, completely booked up... but in May or June... I had to ask an artist [Alex Katz] - very prominent - to leave the gallery... He had been scheduled for an exhibition in November... but this was in June and the gallery was about to close - and I spent my summers in Connecticut then - and I decided I wasn't going to worry about it of think about it, but the right thing would happen at the right time. And I had a lovely ice house in Connecticut outside of Old Lyme - a reconverted ice house; it was enchanting... and I was out on the lawn one summer, a lazy summer afternoon, sunning, reading, and John [Bedenkapp], an old friend, an architect, was there, and I was lying there on my back, sunning, with my eyes closed, not thinking about anything in the world, and suddenly a voice said, 'Andy Warhol.' I hadn't been thinking about artists, I hadn't been thinking about the art world. I hadn't been thinking about the gallery. Everything was utterly remote. I sat up and thought, 'How extraordinary!' My guardian angel. I looked across at John, who was in one of those beach things, you know: sunning and I said, 'John, I think I'm going to call Andy Warhol. And if I can reach him and make an appointment to look at his work, would you like to go with me?' And he said, 'I'd love to.' So I immediately went into the house, looked up Andy's number, called - this is the first time in my life that I'd ever called him. He answered the telephone, and I told him who I was. And I said, 'Can I come and look at your work?' and he said, 'Wow!' And so we made an appointment, and John, indeed, went with me... And Andy showed me this collection of work, and I was absolutely stupefied. There were Marilyn Monroes, there were Do-It-Yourself paintings, the Elvis Presley pictures, the Liz Taylor, Campbell Soup Cans. It was an incredible collection. I was absolutely riveted. And I said, 'Andy, by a miracle, I have November - which as you know is the prime month of the year,' and I said 'I can show you in November.' And he said, 'Wow!' So that was it." (PS504-5)

Ward gave a similar account in an interview published in John Wilcock's book, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (NY: Other Scenes Inc, 1971), again mentioning that John Bedenkapp (not Emile de Antonio) was with her when she invited Warhol to do the show. Note that in the above quote, Ward indicates it was "May or June" when she, or her "guardian angel," came up with the idea of the exhibition. Yet the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné attributes Warhol's Two Dollar Bill paintings to the same period as his One Dollar Bill paintings - March to April 1962 - which was before Ward had approached Warhol. (RN131/147) If the March/April date is correct and it is true, as Ward claimed, that she came up with the idea of the show in May/June, Emile de Antonio's account cannot be correct. Despite his perfunctory language, Carey's version of events seems more dependable than that of de Antonio.

Fortunately, Carey's lover, John Mann, was also there when Latow wrote the cheque for the soup can idea and was interviewed for the 2009 biography Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (NY: Harper, 2009). Although Mann's version of events is different than Carey's, he does at least confirm that the subject of soup cans was discussed at the time. In Mann's version, Warhol decided to paint the soup cans not because he liked soup, but because he disliked it. Mann recalled that Warhol actually said he didn't like Campbell's Soup - that his mother made it every day for lunch and "after all those years, it was like, 'Oh, Mom - again?'" (SC75) As Mann remembered it, Latow asked Andy which flavour of soup he disliked the most and when Warhol responded "all of them," Latow suggested that he buy each flavour and paint them all. (SC75) Warhol's commercial art assistant in the late 1950s, Vito Giallo, has said, however, that Warhol always had soup for lunch. According to Giallo, Warhol's favorite flavour of soup was tomato which Warhol would eat while "watching TV at the same time." Giallo recalls that Warhol's mother "was there to make soup and a sandwich. Lettuce, tomato sandwiches, very simple." (UW20) Warhol's art assistant during the 1960s, Gerard Malanga, would sometimes go to Andy's house for lunch during the pre-Factory days but 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 [Warhol's studio before the Factory] 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).

Warhol also referred to soup cans in an interview for the Face magazine in London in 1985. When journalist David Yarritu asked him about flowers that Warhol's mother used to make from tin cans, 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)

The mention of "peach halves" is interesting because an early tin-can painting by Warhol is of a can of Del Monte Peach Halves which the Warhol catalogue raisonné has attributed to 1961, along with an early Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato Rice) painting, noting that "the borders in both works isolate the can as a discrete, depicted object rather than as an image embedded in an ad" which anticipates "the approach that Warhol was to follow in all of his Campbell's Soup Can series." (RN041)

Ronald Tavel, the scriptwriter of Warhol's early films, gave another reason for Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can paintings. He 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.'" (SH) Tavel's comment is similar to a comment made by Warhol's colleague of the 1950s, Bert Greene, who said in 1978 that "After Andy began his Pop Art, Aaron [Fine] asked him why he was doing it, and Andy said, 'It's the synthesis of nothingness,' which is, of course, the Dada reply." (PS338-9) The ordinariness of the soup cans emphasized the "nothingness" of the subject matter. A soup can was a soup can was a soup can.

The concept of "nothingness" had been circulating for some time in the United States. Jean Paul Sartre's existential tome, Being and Nothingness, was first published in the U.S. in 1956 and Sartre had been on a highly publicized lecture tour of the U.S. during the 1940s. In January 1946 he lectured at Carnegie Hall, presented by the editor of View magazine, Charles Henri Ford, who Warhol would befriend in 1962. (ASL2) It was Charles Henri Ford who introduced Warhol to Gerard Malanga in 1963 and Ford would also be the subject of a Warhol Screen Test (shot by Gerard Malanga) in 1966. (AD78) Although Warhol did not move to New York until 1949, after View had folded, he was certainly aware of Ford's magazine. On January 6, 1944 Ford had sent out a notice to subscribers of the magazine informing them that the Post Office solicitor had advised them that the December 1943 issue of the magazine "was unmailable" because images featuring nudes in the magazine had been deemed obscene. (TI226) An original of the letter has been found in Warhol's Time Capsule 21, although this does not necessarily mean that Warhol had subscribed to the magazine as early as 1943 (when Warhol would have been 15 years old) as the letter begins generically, with "Dear Subscriber." One of Warhol's art assistant from the 1950s, Nathan Gluck, had a large collection of View magazines and later recalled selling most of them to Warhol. (PS322) It's possible that the letter was amongst the collection. View was published from September 1940 to March 1947 and initially concentrated on Surrealist art, poetry and prose but later also focused on existenstialism. (See: "March/April 1946: The 'Paris' issue of View magazine focuses on Existentialism" in The AbEx Chronology.)

Warhol would also probably have been exposed to the concept, or at least the wording, of "nothingness" through the musician John Cage who had brielfly studied under D.T. Suzuki and had been lecturing on Zen concepts of "nothingness" to students, artists and musicians since the 1940s, including a "Lecture on Nothing" presented at the Abstract Expressionists' hangout, The Club in c. 1949/50. (RG) He had also taught at The New School in New York during 1956 - 58 and although the classes were geared toward musicians, many artists were also known to attend, including Allan Kaprow. Cage was, also, of course, a friend of both Robert Rauschenberg and his lover, Jasper Johns. Warhol was known to admire Johns' work and in October 1962, would do a series of silkscreened portraits of Robert Rauschenberg. (RN257)

Earlier in 1961, prior to painting the Campbell's Soup Cans, Warhol had purchased a Jasper Johns' drawing of a light bulb and three Johns' lithographs - Black Flag and two Targets. (SC57) One could argue that Warhol's Soup Cans were, in effect, his version of Johns' Flags - both being American icons although of a slightly different nature. Johns' 1960 sculpture of Ballantine Ale cans (Painted Bronze) has also been seen as a precursor to both Warhol's Soup Cans and the box sculptures that Warhol made for his second Pop exhibition in New York. The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné has noted that the subject matter of Warhol's Schlitz Cans, which he painted around the same time as some of his Soup Cans, "might allude to Johns' Painted Bronze." (RN100) However, whereas Johns' work still retained a painterly aspect, the 32 Campbell's Soup Cans that Warhol would become famous for, which were first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles from July 9 - August 1, 1962, gave an impression of being fairly realistic reproductions of the real thing. As Lucy R. Lippard pointed out in 1966, "by 1961... [Jasper Johns'] cans looked like the harbingers of a full-fledged trend," but by 1962 they "looked like antiques in comparison with the newly emerged Pop Art. For the ale cans were clearly hand-painted, and in no way did they attempt to reproduce exactly the commercial labels, or even the exact size and shape of the actual cans; still more significant, they were on a bronze base - set apart as art." Lippard continues, "Their [Johns' cans] painterly surface rids them of the newly minted mass-produced aura typical of Pop... Pop objects determinedly forgo the uniqueness acquired by time. They are not yet worn or left over. Every Campbell's soup can looks like every other Campbell's soup can..."
(LU77-8)

Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and his box sculptures have also been likened to Duchamp's readymades. Unlike the readymades, however, which were real items (i.e. a shovel or urinal) presented as art, Warhol's Soup Can paintings were representations of the real thing on canvas. Whereas the concept behind Duchamp's readymades seemed to be that any object was art that was called art, the concept behind Warhol's cans was more elusive. In contrast to the pre-Pop art movement of Abstract Expressionism with its abstract representations of universal concepts of truth and beauty, Warhol's Soup Can paintings seemed to be purposely (and ironically) meaningless. The flavour of the soup might have varied but, as Lippard noted, "every Campbell's soup can" appeared to be similar to "every other Campbell's soup can." In regard to when the Campbell's Soup Can paintings were actually painted, assuming that Ted Carey was correct about seeing the actual cans the day after Muriel Latow wrote her cheque for $50, Andy Warhol had, at least, begun preparation for the paintings on 24 November, 1961. Although Warhol may have bought the soup on the 24th, however, he actually worked from reproductions when he did his paintings rather than from the actual cans. The Warhol Catalogue Raisonné has identified three sources - photographs of the real cans taken by Warhol's ex-lover Edward Wallowitch; imagery taken from a Campbell's magazine ad; and a logo from the stationary of the Campbell's soup company. (RN) In regard to who actually came up with the idea of soup cans as subject matter, the Muriel Latow story is more dependable than Emile de Antonio's account. The important aspect of the story, however, is not who came up with the idea of painting soup cans (as Warhol often borrowed ideas from other people) but the fact that Warhol accepted Latow's suggestion and decided how best to represent it on canvas. More important than the origination of the idea was what Warhol did with it. Unlike Japer Johns' ale cans which were sculptural and "set apart as art," Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can paintings were like reproductions of the real thing. But what did they mean? If the Aaron Fine quote can be depended upon, "Nothing." What did they represent? "Nothing." What was the concept behind them? "Nothing." Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can paintings may have had more to do with "the synthesis of nothingness" than with whether or not he ate soup everyday, whether or not he liked it or disliked it, or whether or not he was searching for an iconic sign of the times.

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