Andy Warhol exhibited his Campbell's Soup Cans
On this day · 9 July 1962
A little-known commercial illustrator turned a supermarket staple into a manifesto, and Pop art arrived almost unnoticed.
On July 9, 1962, a then little-known Andy Warhol opened his first solo exhibition of Pop art at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The show comprised 32 separate canvases, each one depicting a different flavor of Campbell’s Soup in the same plain commercial style.
Gallery director Irving Blum arranged the 16-by-20-inch paintings on a narrow ledge that ran the length of the room, so the cans sat in a single row like cans on a supermarket shelf. The deadpan repetition deliberately blurred the line between fine art and mass-produced goods, a gesture that unsettled many viewers.
The show was quiet, but its echo reshaped modern art.
Few people attended, Warhol himself was absent, and a planned follow-up was scrapped. Blum eventually bought the full set back to keep it whole. Today the complete group of 32 canvases is one of the prized holdings of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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