Pop art

The story

A soup in a gallery

In the summer of 1962, in a small art gallery in Los Angeles, something strange appeared: thirty-two paintings lined up on the wall, like cans on a supermarket shelf. Each one showed the same subject, a can of Campbell's soup, in a different flavour: tomato, chicken and rice, mushroom, beef. People who walked in were puzzled. Was it art, or a joke? The artist was a young man from New York, Andy Warhol.

Warhol, born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to a family of immigrants from Eastern Europe, had first worked as a commercial artist, and knew the tricks of newspapers, shop windows and billboards well. Painting a tinned soup, something every American saw every day, was a deliberate choice. He said he liked what was simple, repeated, the same for everybody: a sandwich, a bottle of Coca-Cola, a tin. There was nothing noble, ancient or romantic about it: it was everyday life, turned into a work of art.

What is pop art?

“Pop” is an English word that comes from “popular”. Pop art was born in the 1950s and 1960s, in England and above all in the United States, when the richest countries had discovered prosperity: supermarkets, television, comics, advertising, cars, film and music stars. Pop artists took exactly those mass symbols and put them in museums. Before then “serious” art painted landscapes, portraits, religious subjects or abstract shapes; now comics and products for sale were entering the galleries.

Among the first to work on it, in England, was Richard Hamilton, with a collage of 1956 showing a modern home full of advertising objects. In the United States Roy Lichtenstein stood out: he enlarged comic-strip panels with their coloured dots and sound-effect words, as in “Whaam!”. Claes Oldenburg made enormous soft sculptures of hamburgers and everyday objects. In Italy, in Rome, a group of artists, including Mario Schifano and Tano Festa, brought pop art to the city of ancient monuments.

The picture factory

Warhol wanted his art to be produced as if in a factory. In his later works he used screen printing, a printing technique in which ink passes through a stretched mesh and lets you repeat the same image many times. His studio in New York was called “The Factory”: a big space covered in silver foil where assistants worked and musicians and actors came and went. In the following years he also painted the faces of famous people. After the sudden death of Marilyn Monroe, in August 1962, he made a work of it, the “Marilyn Diptych”, repeating her face in fifty images, in bright colours on one side and in black and white on the other, as if to say that fame lasts as long as an advertisement.

The thirty-two “Campbell's Soup Cans” were put on sale at one hundred dollars each. The gallery owner Irving Blum bought them all to keep them together and, in 1996, sold the whole series to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MoMA, for fifteen million dollars. Today Warhol's paintings are among the most expensive and best known in the world.

Art for everyone

Pop art made many people angry: critics and collectors said it was not real art. But it was hugely successful because it spoke about things everybody knew, with strong colours and clear images. It made people realise that popular culture, the culture of supermarkets and advertising, deserves attention like everything else, and it invited them to look at everyday objects with different eyes. Warhol is also credited with a famous phrase: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”