ANDY WARHOL & His CAMPBELL'S SOUP CANS
- The 1962 Series: The original series of 32 paintings, which now resides in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962.
- Method: While sometimes thought to be purely printed, the 1962 cans were largely hand-painted or hand-stamped, although they adopted a sterile, commercial appearance that removed traces of the artist's hand.
- Inspiration: Warhol, who was a successful commercial illustrator before becoming a fine artist, chose soup cans because he wanted to paint something that represented American consumer culture, famously noting he had the same lunch for 20 years.
- Impact: The paintings shocked the art world, which was then dominated by Abstract Expressionism, by focusing on "low-brow" advertising imagery rather than emotional, personal expression.
- Further Variations: Warhol later produced Campbell's Soup Cans I (1968) and II (1969), which were screen prints that fully embraced the mechanical, mass-production style.
- Legacy: The soup cans cemented Warhol as a leader of the Pop Art movement and transformed commercial logos into enduring art icons.
ANDY WARHOL'S "TURQUOISE MARILYN"
"Turquoise Marilyn" refers to Any Warhol's iconic 1964 Pop Art Portrait of Marilyn Monroe. This specific silkscreen painting is part of a series Warhol created using different background colors, with the turquoise version being one of the most famous and highly valued.
The painting features Warhol's signature Pop Art style using high-contrast silkscreen printing to layer vivid colors over a publicity photo from the 1953 film Niagara. This specific version is noted for its striking turquoise background, lemon-yellow hair, and bright pink skin tones.
- Turquoise Marilyn : Sold to Steven Cohen in 2007 for a rumored $80 million.
- Shot Sage Blue Marilyn: Sold for $195 million in May 2022, setting the record for the highest price for an American artist at auction.
- Orange Marilyn: Sold privately for roughly $200 million in 2018. The Turquoise painting is famous for being the only painting in the series to escape being struck by bullets when a performance artist shot at the canvases stacked in Warhol's studio.
Warhol actually painted five colored Marilyns in 1964 with different colored backgrounds: red, orange, light blue, sage blue, and turquoise and he stored them at The Factory, his studio on East 47th Street in Manhattan. Dorothy Podber (1932–2008), a friend of Factory photographer Billy Name, saw the recently completed paintings stacked against one another at the studio and asked Warhol if she could shoot them. Believing that she meant she wanted to photograph the paintings, Warhol agreed. Podber doffed her pair of black gloves, withdrew a small revolver from her purse, and fired a shot into the stack of four "Marilyn" paintings, which became known as The Shot Marilyns. (The fifth painting with the turquoise background was not in the stack.)
