When Warhol’s show opened in 1962, Pop was just getting started. “I used to have the same lunch every day for 20 years.” How Were the Soup Can Paintings First Received? And Warhol himself had grown up with Campbell's soup. The classic label design had changed little since its turn-of-the-20th-century debut, including the homey, cursive "Campbell's" script, which according to a company archivist, was very similar to founder Joseph Campbell's own signature. Graphic punch-and an air of nostalgia-may be two reasons Warhol chose Campbell’s product line as his Pop icon. “Did he just like the gold circle’s graphic punch?” “Is it simply because other paints don’t stick well on top of gold? Because getting the medals just right would take too much work and might never look good, anyway?” pondered Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik. Instead of detailing the intricate medallion at the center of every can's label-representing the “gold medal of excellence” that Campbell’s Soup won at the 1900 Paris Exposition-Warhol substituted a plain gold circle. Although they were supposed to look like they’d been made mechanically, every painting was slightly different-and not only in the flavor on the label.īut there’s one thing all 32 paintings have in common. In using fine art techniques to depict an everyday manufactured object, Warhol captured an essential contradiction in Pop art. Small details-tiny splashes of red on the Tomato Soup painting, the unevenly applied fleur-de-lys stamp on others-betrayed the paintings’ handmade origins. For consistency, he used a hand stamp to make the fleur-de-lys pattern around each label’s bottom edge, but he didn’t always get it right. To make the “Campbell’s Soup Can” paintings, Warhol projected the image of a soup can onto his blank canvas, traced the outline and details, then carefully filled it in using old-fashioned brushes and paint. They tried to smooth over or eliminate all traces of their own art-making processes-like brush strokes-so that their work seemed almost mechanical, like the mass-produced subject matter it portrayed.Īlmost. Abstract artists of the 1950s like Jackson Pollock may have glorified themselves as creative, individualist geniuses, but Pop artists of the 1960s took the opposite approach. They used humor and irony to comment on how mass production and consumerism had come to dominate so much of American life and culture. Instead of portraits, landscapes, battle scenes or other subjects that experts thought of as “art,” artists like Warhol took images from advertising, comic books and other bits of popular culture-the “pop” in Pop art. But, I had to do it as I was the older son - I don’t remember my brother eagerly offering, but I’m sure he also did it at times - and my dad didn’t seem to want to make the climb to put up and later take down the filler pipe.Artist Andy Warhol with one of his later Campbell's-themed projects Fear of climbingĪn upright silo demands at some point that they must be climbed. I was deathly afraid of climbing the 36-foot-tall poured concrete silo while growing up on the Oncken farm in Dane county. In the late 1950’s and 1960’s the blue, glass lined, airtight, steel Harvestore appeared on the scene and literally changed the silage and hay-making scene. Not only did the company sell the blue, distinctive, airtight Harvestores, they sold the story of making quality hay by cutting early and storing properly. I’ve often written that the Harvestore (although expensive) was the major factor in moving farmers to cut hay in early June (rather than late June or July as was customary) thus providing far more nutritious forage (haylage). View Gallery: Silos still stand as monuments to past dairy herds Harvestores changed farming The first silos were mere holes in the ground dug to preserve the entire stock of grass or corn for winter cattle feed. Then came bigger rectangular holes called trench silos, followed by the short, upright structures made of wooden boards fitted together (staves) or concrete and field stone. They are seldom the subject of family memories, nor did I ever hear a farmer brag about his “great silo.” To the non-farmer they appear much the same - round and tall. Then there are the upright silos that hold the all-important feed that keeps the milk flowing and the milk checks coming. True, many dairy farmers (especially older farmers who had small herds) remember cow’s names and their individual habits and idiosyncrasies.ĭairy barns are a second home for those who work with the animal care routines that are repeated so often that many farmers know more about the barn than the house in which they live. But, cows come and go depending on their milk and reproduction records.Ī very few are remembered for decades via their production, show records and photos.
Dairy farmers, former dairy farmers and would-be dairy farmers will always remember the cows, the barns and the farm fields that are such a big part of Wisconsin dairying.
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