On July 9, 1962, thirty-two identical small canvases sat on narrow white wooden ledges at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. Each 20-by-16-inch panel depicted a single red-and-white can of Campbell’s soup: Tomato, Clam Chowder, Pepper Pot, Black Bean, Cream of Mushroom, Cheddar Cheese. Gallery director Irving Blum had set them up along a three-inch-wide shelf running down the room, explicitly mimicking the shelf layout of a Ralphs grocery store.
The response from the Los Angeles art establishment was immediate ridicule. Down the block, rival art dealer Artie Lowman went to a nearby supermarket, bought dozens of actual tin cans of Campbell's soup for ten cents apiece, and stacked them neatly in his gallery’s front window. Above the display, Lowman taped a hand-painted sign: "Do Not Be Misled. Get the Original. Our Low Price: Two for 33 Cents."
Warhol had priced his painted canvases at $100 each. For two weeks, visitors walked into Ferus Gallery to giggle, scoff, or ask if the gallery was secretly running a grocery store clearance sale. Five of the thirty-two canvases actually sold: actor Dennis Hopper bought one, film producer Donald Factor bought another, and three local collectors picked up single varieties as unusual wall art for kitchen decor. But as Blum watched the gallery floor, a strange conviction took hold of him.
The Misunderstanding of Mass Production
Contrary to popular belief, Warhol’s original 1962 soup cans were not silkscreen prints. In early 1962, working in his Manhattan studio on Lexington Avenue, Warhol was still refining his mechanical process; he used an opaque projection lantern (an epidiascope) to project commercial line drawings onto raw canvas, traced the pencil outlines by hand, painted the red enamel tops with Liquitex synthetic polymer paint, hand-lettered the gold medallions, and pressed a custom hand-carved rubber stamp onto the bottom edge of each stretched canvas art panel to replicate the fleur-de-lis trim.
If you examine the 32 canvases at close range in MoMA today, the human irregularities are striking: the hand-lettered "Soup" script varies in brush stroke thickness from panel to panel; pencil guidelines remain visible under thin white coats of gesso; the rubber-stamped fleur-de-lis pattern along the base is smudged on the Onion soup canvas and crisp on the Scotch Broth; and subtle drops of stray red paint rest on the white tin labels of Vegetable Beef and Cream of Pecan.
Warhol did not choose 32 varieties at random. He bought a product list directly from Campbell’s Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey, detailing every single flavor on American market shelves in 1962. For twenty years, Warhol had eaten the same soup for lunch every day out of a heated tin can, and he treated the lineup not as 32 separate paintings, but as a single complete portrait of post-war American consumer culture that defined the rise of Pop Art.
The $1,000 Installment Deal
Irving Blum realized that selling the canvases piecemeal destroyed the entire point of the work. Breaking up the set meant turning a monolithic cultural statement into thirty-two decorative novelty items for Beverly Hills dining rooms.
Blum spent days on the telephone tracking down the buyers who had put down deposits. He called Dennis Hopper first. Hopper had reserved a single canvas for $100. Blum explained his realization: "Dennis, these paintings belong together as a single installation. If we break them up, the power is lost." Hopper agreed to surrender his purchase, saying, "If you can keep them together, Irving, take mine back." Blum managed to buy back all five sold canvases, refunding the deposits out of his own pocket.
Then Blum called Warhol in New York with a proposal. He offered to buy the entire set of 32 canvases for a total price of $1,000, payable in ten monthly installments of $100. Warhol, who was still paying off commercial illustration bills and buying art supplies on credit, immediately agreed. "Oh, Irving, that would be wonderful," Warhol said. "I would love for them to stay together."
From La Cienega Ledge to MoMA
Blum paid Warhol $100 a month for ten months until July 1963, when the $1,000 bill was paid in full. He packed the 32 canvases into wooden crates and kept them intact in his personal collection for thirty-four years, resisting dozens of high-value offers to break up the set for individual sales.
In 1996, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the complete 32-canvas series from Irving Blum in a combined purchase and gift valued at $15 million. The 32 hand-painted cans that a rival gallery dealer once mocked with 33-cent supermarket tins had become the definitive icon of modern wall art history.
When asked decades later why he bought the entire set on a $100-a-month layaway plan when nobody else wanted them, Blum was straightforward: "They were so simple, so provocative, and so absurdly familiar that nobody could look at them without arguing. And in 1962, that was the only definition of art that mattered."
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