Political Cartoons

PrinceOfLeigh said:

Excellent posting on this thread, the only one I don't understand it the Tomato Soup picture which looks to me like a picture of Tomato Soup. Can anyone enlighten me as to the underlying message as it is too underlying for me to see!

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Rambuchan said:

I'd go and find it but I work my ass off enough for this thread as it is .

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A soup can. For centuries artists had abided by the principle that any replication of reality in an artwork had to convey meaning. Andy Warhol saw things differently: "I hate just objects, they have no interest for me at all, so when I paint I just make more and more of these objects, without any feeling for them." And when asked why he'd chosen a soup can of all things, he replied tersely that it was because he had been eating it every day for 20 years. Warhol drew on simple means to undermine the Sublime and the Beautiful, the seemingly most noble traits of art, elevating a discarded, worthless object by making it the subject of a large-scale work on canvas - this affront to conventional American exhibition goers culminated in a rage-filled scandal the first time the picture was exhibited in Los Angeles the same year. It was in that same year that Warhol discovered silk screening (a screen printing technique), and the Zurich soup can became the first subject of a series and the departure point for a period of enormous productivity that left out none of the icons of the 20th century, from Mao Tse Tung, the Heinz ketchup bottle and Marilyn Monroe to the electric chair. Warhol ultimately became a Pop icon himself.

In retrospect, Andy Warhol pushed complete apathy to art further than all his contemporaries, not destroying art in the process but giving it new potential. It may sound strange but he is comparable to Marcel Duchamp in this way. With its 1975 purchase of Andy Warhol's Big Torn Campbell's Soup Can, Vegetable Beef and Roy Lichtenstein's Yellow Brushstroke the Kunsthaus added two landmark works of the 1960s to its collection of contemporary American art. > Source <

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Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans were the works that transformed the artist into a household name overnight. From the time that they first came into being in late 1961 they were instantly recognized by both their admirers and their detractors as being the ultimate icon of Pop art. Deceptively simple, Warhol's celebration of this bland, ordinary everyday commodity that everyone in America instantly recognised awoke the world to a new way of looking at modern life and set them thinking. As Warhol's great hero, Marcel Duchamp observed at the time, "If you take a Campbell's Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty soup cans on one canvas" (Cited in R. Constable, "New York's Avant-Garde and How It Got There", New York Herald Tribune, May 17, 1964, p. 10).

Depicting the Campbell's Soup Can in the form of a portrait Warhol presented an ordinary and inanimate "still-life" object as an icon of consumer capitalism and the modern supermarket and offered it up to scrutiny without comment. It was the cold objectivity and lack of any sense of authorship that really provoked, for people were forced by the work to make their own decisions as to whether this image - along with its selection and concept - was a critique or a celebration of mass-consumerist culture. In interviews given at the time Warhol was repeatedly questioned on this point as interviewers attempted to draw him into a position on either one side of the argument or the other. True to form, and recognizing that the power of the Soup Can existed without him, Warhol remained clearly ambiguous and commented only that he painted the soup can because he "liked" it. "I just paint things I always thought were beautiful," he once elaborated, "things you use every day and never think about. I'm working in soups, and I've been doing some paintings of money. I just do it because I like it" (Quoted in D. Bourdon, New York, 1989, p. 90). The implacable objectivity of the Soup Can was reinforced by the way in which Warhol chose to render it. Painted in the impersonal style of an advertising hoarding and using stencils, the Soup Can paintings emphasized the packaging of the instant soup, becoming one of the first examples in Warhol's oeuvre to lay an emphasis on the surface nature of the imagery.

This is particularly the case with the portrait--format Soup Can paintings that Warhol exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Here Warhol presented thirty-two individual portraits of each variety of Campbell's Soup exhibited collectively as if on the shop shelf. Each individual portrait was painted in a flat graphic style that concentrated on the frontality of the image stressing the singular and iconic nature of label on the can. In this way, although the first Soup Cans were all painted works, they to some extent anticipated the silkscreen technique that would shortly afterwards characterise Warhol's working process for the rest of his career. Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) is a large silkscreened work based on the format of the thirty-two Soup Can paintings exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in 1962. It is part of a series of Soup Can paintings that Warhol executed in 1965 using, what has been described as,"fauve" colors.

Returning to the theme that had made him famous Warhol has jazzed up the original image by drenching each work in the kind of cosmetic colours he was then using in his "Flower" paintings. One critic, John Coplans once observed that Warhol showed in his Soup Cans that they were in a way "like people; their names, sexes, ages, origins, tastes and passions may well be different", he argued, "but an advanced consumer-oriented, technological society squeezes them into the same vat Warhol dehumanizes people and humanizes soup cans" (J. Coplans. Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, pp. 50-52). In this later series of Soup Cans Warhol was not only treating each can as an individual but through colour, attempting to transform each one into a celebrity. Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) would perhaps, in this respect have been a particular personal favourite of Warhol's being the flavor of soup which his mother always used make for him when he was child growing up in Pittsburg. As Warhol recalled to Gene Swenson in Art News in 1963, "I used to have the same lunch (soup and a sandwich) every day for twenty years. I guess, the same thing over and over again. Someone said my life has dominated me: I like that idea." > Source <

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