Born
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1928, Andy Warhola moved
to New York City immediately after graduating from college
in 1949. Within a few months of being in New York, he established
himself as a very successful commercial artist and soon
changed his last name from Warhola to Warhol. After winning
numerous awards in the commercial world, Warhol began to
explore other ways of showing his work, beginning with a
series of paintings that were based on comic strips for
store window displays.
Warhol
tried to make his paintings of soup cans look the same,
much like the factory-made soup cans themselves. Each soup
can bears the name of a different kind of Campbell’s soup,
such as chicken noodle. He stamped each canvas with an outline
of a can and then painted the shapes and letters in. This
process results in smooth surfaces and blocks of color and
letters similar to advertisements, but they still show some
of Warhol’s brushstrokes.
The
rubber-stamp method Warhol used when painting soup cans
lead him to experiment with screenprinting, a printing process
that became a fundamental part of his work. For more information
about screenprinting visit What
is a Print?
- Do
you think the way in which Warhol made Campbell’s
Soup Cans matters? Why or why not?
