What did Andy Warhol's soup can paintings mean? (2024)

Andy Warhol’s art is amongst some of the most debated in history. Since its conception, people have been trying to decide what he was trying to say with pop art, as he turned utterly normal household items into cultural creations. But none have sparked a debate quite as enduring as the question of what the meaning is behind his Campbell soup cans.

But really, the debate is Warhol’s own doing. While other artists might engage in meaningful discussion about their motivations and considerations, Warhol was purposefully obtuse. In interviews, he said things like, “An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.” He seemed to completely reject the idea that to be an artist was at all mystical or wise as he instead declared, “I am a deeply superficial person.”

The Andy Warhol presented to the public was a myth he made. He seemed dedicated to playing this character of a “void”, a man obsessed with fleeting fame, wishing he could become a machine and seeing his artistry, a talent he’d honed and worked at for a lifetime, as nothing more than a business. He was the complete antithesis of who society believes an artist is or should be, rejecting all wishy-washy notions to instead play the stone-faced, emotionless money maker who cared more to see a beautiful celebrity than a masterpiece.

So, with this image of Warhol, his pop art appears to be nothing more than pretty pictures. It would be easy to declare the Coca-Cola bottles and soup cans as utterly meaningless, and Warhol would be fine with that definition. In fact, in an interview with his own magazine, Interview, the artist was asked, “Did you really do the Campbell’s Soup cans because you had it for lunch every day?” As Warhol responds, “Oh yeah, I had Campbell’s Soup every day for lunch for about 20 years. And a sandwich,” chalking the entire image up to nothing but a favourite meal.

But Warhol’s love for the piece suggests that there was always more to it. “What’s your favourite painting of all your work?” the interviewer asked him, to which he said, “I guess the soup can.” Even in 1977, over ten years after making the Campbell’s images in 1962 and after having moved through various phases and styles since then, the images endured as he most beloved.

Maybe the true meaning of the soup cans lies in connection to his co*ke bottle pieces, made the same year during his first pop art outings. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks co*ke, Liz Taylor drinks co*ke, and just think, you can drink co*ke, too,” he said in his book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “A co*ke is a co*ke, and no amount of money can get you a better co*ke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking,” he explained, almost seeing Coca-Cola as the great leveller in society. In this reading, images of co*ke bottles and soup cans become more than just meaningless imagery; they become the ultimate images of American society. They’re household objects that people on every level of society and class engage with.

To take that reading even further, perhaps there’s even a more personal element to it that made the images stay close to Warhol’s heart. In reality, Warhol wasn’t born Warhol. He was Andrew Warhola, the child of working-class immigrants. He was raised poor, really poor, and as a sickly child, his early life felt utterly downtrodden.

In this way, the glamorised images of simple things feel like Warhol romanticising the luxuries he used to dream of. He always fantasised about living the American dream as he looked up to the likes of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Household name products like co*ke felt like a way to connect to them, so by romanticising them in his art. He elevates them from the dull co*ke he drank into the Coca-Cola he saw in the movies.

As for Cambell’s Soups, these paintings seem to do the same. They feel like an attempt to make normal life glamorous. As he painted the simple, cheap and accessible lunch he had every day and continued to have even when he became the rich and famous man he dreamed of being, he turned his life into the fantasy he’d always had in mind.

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