Beef with Vegetables and Barley
1968

This set of ten color screenprints is based on the Campbell’s soup can, one of Andy Warhol’s best-known icons. In 1962 Warhol produced a series of thirty-two silkscreen paintings depicting the cans—one canvas for each variety of soup available at the time. He continued to produce images of the soup cans for more than two decades, a process of repetition that reflects his characteristic interest in mimicking the conditions of mechanical reproduction. In the Campbell’s soup can series, as elsewhere in mass culture, an “original” reproduction resulted in many other reproductions. Likewise, the screenprint technique—which removed any trace of the artist’s hand from the creative process—dovetailed with Warhol’s mass-produced subject. The artist’s own encounters with the homogeneity of postwar consumerism perhaps explain his particular attraction to the Campbell’s soup can. As he remarked, in typically laconic terms: “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.”