W: Andy Warhol

Those damned soup cans. I think that you have to have lived under a rock to have not seen or had some contact with Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can paintings. Then you either love them or hate them. At various times in my life, I have had both reactions. When I finally got to see them at MoMA, for the first time I had a true reaction. Again, this was one of those times when seeing the work in person was so much more significant than in books or online. There is a hand work in them that shows through when you get an opportunity to see them in person and stop to study them that I lost in smaller translations.

“Earlier artists, like Monet, had painted the same motif in series in order to display minute discriminations of perception, the shift of light and color form hour to hour on a haystack, and how these could be recorded by the subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about sameness (though with different labels): same brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as product. They mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans.”
- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

Most of Warhol’s work was accomplished in the six years following the show of his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962. The American iconic Pop Artist attacked the products and celebrities of the time in his repetitious silk screened paintings. He takes a role as spectator in his work and creates work that is both copied and original.

Recently, I’ve seen clips and documentaries on the Ovation channel about his “Factory” days. I’m not sure that I like the work he created—does that really matter—but I think it is important to understand how original it was in the time and place of the 1960s. Today it’s easy to replicate his basic approach in a computer. But the original work is definitely a hand-done process and that’s where I think it derives its originality and impact.

The poster-color silkscreen over sketches of the celebrities defines the era. I don’t think that you would get very far discussing Marilyn Monroe and not consider the Warhol painting. I put the Ingrid as a Nun painting here because my daughter Alexis loves Ingrid Bergman.

I like Jasper John’s Ballantine ale cans better than the soup cans. But I like beer better than soup. Go figure. With Warhol, I keep trying to pull away, but his images keep popping up over and over again. Not all influences are pretty or good.