“32 Campbell’s Soup Cans” (detail) 1962, Andy Warhol, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York.
What you see here is actually 32 hand painted and framed images of cans of Campbell’s soup. At the time the company sold 32 flavours and each of them is represented. These paintings were hung as shown arranged like cans of soup on a shelf in a shop. When asked why he choose to paint the 32 varieties of Campbell’s soup, Warhol replied, that as a child he ate it every day. Warhol is now famous for appropriating an image from consumer culture and mass media and reproducing it in multiple images. He said that art should not be the preserve of a elect few, but should be for the mass of the American people. By painting cans of soup, arranged in rows as in a store, Warhol provokes the viewer to look again at the ordinary and every day. But Warhol flattened out the subject, loosing variations of light and shadow, and so losing the illusion of three dimensional space. Some saw this as a playful rebellion against the artistic canons of Western Art. But others connect it with the icon. Only few writers take on board the fact that throughout his life, Warhol was a practicing Catholic of an Orthodox Rite. Until he left Pittsburgh for New York at the age of 21, he went weekly to Church with his mother and prayed before the Iconostasis, which is screen separating the congregation from the sanctuary in an Orthodox Christian church. It is always covered in icons. In New York, Warhol went most afternoons the nearby Dominican Church of St Vincent Ferrer. He always wore a cross and carried a rosary beads in his pocket. But it is his Byzantine Catholic roots which may have shaped his art. Icons are flat as are Warhol’s images. They is no attempt to represent real space, but rather the concern is with sacred space. Icons are repetitious because they are written according to strict rules. The artist is not called to be original. Rather, he or she prayerfully seeks to produce not an image of the sacred but an image which itself participates in and mediates the sacred. On the icon’s surface the invisible becomes visible in a spiritual way, so that the sacred is not so much revealed as encountered. The array of soup cans might speak of contemporary American culture, even of the “American Dream”, or a supposed egalitarian ethos because they tasted the same in the mouths of rich and poor alike. But Warhol grew up in his mother’s apartment, not just eating Campbell’s soup, but looking at a reproduction of Leonardo’s last Supper, which later would feature in his work. Perhaps in his soup cans Warhol suggests the unseen mystery of the Eucharist, because like soup it nourishes and sustains. Today in our culture, these cans remind me contemporary food bank. And actually Andy Warhol was a regular helper at a homelessness project run by the Church of the Heavenly Rest. On the program for his Memorial Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral, the pastor of that Church wrote about Andy Warhol’s regular presence at the project. “He loved these nameless New Yorkers and they loved him back. We will pause to remember Andy this Easter, confident that he will be feasting with us at a Heavenly Banquet, because he had heard another Homeless Person who said: “I was hungry and you gave me food…”
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