July 4th's Tribute to Andy Warhol (Art no.2) by sandra46
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Description
Campbell's Soup Cans is a work of art produced in 1962 by Andy Warhol. It consists of 32 canvases, each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can, one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The individual paintings were produced with a semi-mechanized silkscreen process, using a non-painterly style. Campbell's Soup Cans helped to usher in pop art as a major art movement in the USA. The combination of the semi-mechanized process, the non-painterly style, and the commercial subject initially caused offense, especially among elitist artists and critics devoted to the 'fine art' religion.The pundits could not believe an artist would reduce the art form to the equivalent of a trip to the local grocery store. The work did not translate into monetary success for Warhol. Dennis Hopper was the first of only a half dozen to pay $100 for a canvas. At first, the cans were accurate representations of actual Campbell's cans, but as his series progressed, they became more surrealistic, with Warhol experimenting with negative-reversed color schemes and other varied techniques (many of these which would be used on other Warhol paintings of the period, such as his celebrity silkscreens of the 1960s.)
Warhol had a positive view of ordinary culture and felt the abstract expressionists had taken great pains to ignore the splendor of modernity. The Campbell's Soup Can series, along with his other series, provided him with a chance to express his positive view of modern culture.The regimented multiple can depictions almost become an abstraction whose details are less important than the panorama. In a sense, the representation was more important than that which was represented. Warhol's interest in machinelike creation during his early pop art days was misunderstood by those in the art world, whose value system was threatened by mechanization. In Europe, audiences had a very different take on his work. Many perceived it as a subversive and Marxist satire on American capitalism, which it wasn't, in fact was an appreciation of modernity.In his own way, Warhol showed the truth of what philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in The Origin of the Work of Art: '... at bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary.'
Campbell Soup Company, however, in 1910 had created a Lithograph Embossed Tin Plate Sign, predating Warhol's Pop Art by half a century. To celebrate their special 125th Anniversary, they created a special edition replica. I photographed it in the museum shop at Yorktown, Virginia.
I manipulated the image in order to reproduce the idea of numberless replicas allowed by mechanical reproduction, using both the tin plate and a photo of Andy Warhol's pop persona I manipulated to hint to his celebrity silkscreen series.I hope you'll enjoy it.
Thanks for your kind comments.
Comments (42)
theprojectionist
Are yes loved this Artists Stuff,great piece Sandy,best regards
schonee
Wonderful!
Kaartijer
Interesting work, nice tribute!
tennesseecowgirl
VERY COOL~~~ mmmm mmm good~
mickeyrony
It is beautiful and good work, exceptional narration. my Beautiful. Cheer for the excellence of your posts ((5++)) C'est un beau et bon travail ,narration exceptionnelle . ma Belle . Bravo pour l'excellence de tes posts ((5++))
KatesFriend
This has been very enlightening, I never knew all this about Warhol. I certainly misjudged him in what his art meant. Thanks for this.
Marinette
E' veramente un bellisimo tributo! :)
myrrhluz
Excellent narrative and wonderful manipulation of Warhol's work! Great image! I like the shadows going across it!
Chipka
This is marvelous and a perfect tribute to a great artist. Though I can't say I'm a fan of everything Warhol did, I admire his guts and his willingness to see value in what was modern at the time. I like to think I see the value of things in the here and now as well...though quite often, a lot of my own works delve into the past: not as a means of ignoring the present, but in hopefully showing where the present came from! I love the image you've created here, the cleverness of it and the wonderful details. This is quite fantastic!
danapommet
I don't think that Andy Warhol was very understood by the average American and I was very happy to see this posting. Very well done Sandra and wonderful narrative. Dana
KarmaSong
Excellent tribute to the founder of Pop'art!
anahata.c
First, I just read over my last comment, and whoa did it get confusing in spots! I could re-do it, but it takes so long in these tiny boxes; and then, with HTML (for italics), it means skimming over everything to find what I italicized. (I once didn't edit, and found, 3 weeks later, that my comment came out in ALL italics, which must've made the artist think I was reeeeeeealllllly moved by his piece. So I'm a lot more careful about that now.) (There's a work of art in that, I'm sure: Maybe I'll do a "comment" painting one of these days...) Anyway, mea culpa for my confusions! These comment boxes are like crawl spaces or a confessional... But to this image: First, the image itself is terrific: You did a great job with warhol-like repetition; and then you added warhol himself (voila!), lurking in there like a ghost; and then you repeated him, ala warhol's art. Great job Sandra, great piece of design, commentary & intuition. As for the revolution that this helped create...yes, you got it. People sometimes think that his screening was more mechanical than thought out, but he did add his own vision as he used photos, etc, as his base. (His celebrity series added forms & colors which could be searing and devastating---his Marilyn Monroe series is a searing vision into not just M.Monroe, but into our vision of celebrity itself.) So the original CSoup panels were partly his hand, though made to be very dry & mechanical. But when you see them in person---maybe you have?---you're really struck at the fact that he created an amazing juxtaposition: an image that looks reproduced & untouched by human hands, and yet which is still a painting: It's a mechanical but human-made image. That was one of the powers of Warhol's work: seeing the mechanical through human's hands. Irving Blum, the man who originally displayed these, called them "complicated". Just that: "Complicated". I don't think he was referring to the actual rendering, but to the concept: ie, that Warhol combined a work of art with concepts that rested outside the art. I.e., that a work of art can be about how we 'view' art---in this case, that a painting of a soup-can can be about how we view soup-cans. We don't really view household soup-cans as art---at least not consciously---yet, by making a stark non-interpretive painting of one, we suddenly are forced to see them as art. So that simple can suddenly shone forth as a vivid & tactile painting. In doing that, Warhol did a commentary on the very way we view art. I'm sure that's part of what Blum found 'complicated'... And then there was the repetition: same basic image, transformed by changes across time & space. (Am I influenced by that? One only has to glance at my gallery to see the multi-panel influence. I thought, "does a work of art end with the last stroke? There are variations, variations & variations, and each one has equal weight." So instead of choosing one panel, I made a sequence of several. Yes, I'm truly influenced by Warhol.) Fact was, Warhol gave us all permission to see a work of art as a commentary on another one, and another & so on. It had been done before, even in the multi-panel pieces of the Middle Ages...but Warhol did it as few had. And that, alone, was a shock to the Abstract Expressionists, who put it all into THE WORK (duh-duh-duh-duhhhhhh!) (that was the opening of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, if you didn't recognize my brilliant transcription!), and who found warhol's panels a complete denial of the Single Work. Besides...they regarded warhol as too rooted in commercial art---even though several of them came from commercial art---and warhol, hungry for recognition, was hurt that they couldn't embrace him because of his commercial roots. (Ironic: Do you know Warhol's early advertising illustrations or record-covers, etc? His style was so florid and so jazzy & creative, you'd think the A.Expressionists would've recognized his wonderful musical hand. But they didn't. They saw the soup cans & thought he was insulting their inward-journeys by pitting them against cheap everyday objects...How fickle art movements are: They---such radical artists themselves---treated others with the same skeptical eye that they'd received for their work, at first.) But that subject material---the everyday & corporate & commercial art---was the start of the Pop movement, which you got too. And maybe Warhol's strange stare in those ghost-images you used, above, is his way of staring back at the artists of his time and saying, "see...I wasn't so far-off after all..." And there's a link between these cans and some of the artists you show later in this series: ie, artists who were regarded as "artisans" rather than artists, in part because they did images for popular imagination rather than for the elite. And finally, the soup cans were icons for warhol, who grew up surrounded by icons in the churches & homes of his Pennsylvania town. He was no doubt drawn-in by the power of the "small image," and its repetition across walls. So he took the icons of our day & turned them into modern sacred icons. When you see these can paintings in person (along with his Brillo boxes, etc), you see vivid, clear, almost crystalline "beings". They almost "shine," sitting there removed from their place in the cupboard or in the commercial boardroom. Suddenly they become a crystalline presence, as if they were now in the sacred circle where everything becomes an object of prayer & rite. They're so strange & new, that way. So odd & tactile. That's one of the transformations he created. Another wonderful entry, with a great warhol-ian image, and all the salient facts about warhol and his time. This really relates to what comes after this...your installments all speak to each other, you build in this series, they would make a wonderful booklet. More terrific & thought-provoking work, Sandra.