Campbell's Soup I: Beef with Vegetables and Barley

By 1968 the Campbell's soup can was already Warhol's signature. He had first painted the 32 varieties by hand in 1962, one canvas per flavor, and the row of them had baffled the Los Angeles gallery-goers who saw them. Six years on he came back to the subject, but this time as a screenprint: 250 portfolios, ten cans each, this beef with vegetables and barley among them. The method now matched the thing it showed, a grocery product turned out in an edition, the label reproduced by machine rather than copied by brush. Look at the gold seal in the middle of the can. It stands for a real gold medal Campbell's won at the Paris world's fair of 1900, a mark of quality the company had printed on its tins for decades before Warhol ever reached for one.