In 1962 Andy Warhol painted 32 separate Campbell's soup cans for the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles — one for each soup variety then on sale (Tomato, Mushroom, Chicken Noodle, Pepper Pot, and so on). Each canvas measures 51 × 41 cm; they were installed on a shelf in the gallery as if real soup cans. The paintings were offered at $100 each; during the show, a grocery shop opened on the opposite corner advertising real soup cans for less.

Warhol painted each canvas by hand with a brush; he moved to silkscreen — the mechanical reproduction technique that would make him famous — only after this series. The 32 canvases therefore differ slightly from one another: the reflection on the lids, the stamped letters, the drips of paint all carry traces of hand-production. But Warhol concealed these differences: aligned uniformly, set against an identical white ground, presented industrially. The impression is one of a supermarket shelf where the experience of 'same can, thirty-two flavours' has been carried into art.

The proposition was radical. Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 50s had treated painting as a spiritual struggle — Pollock's brush was the painter's unconscious. Warhol proposed the precise opposite: art could be cool, mechanical, and stay flush with the surface of consumer life. 'Being an artist isn't deep,' he said. 'I love soup.' That indifferent posture became the basic stance of Pop Art — the lifting of the boundary between art and advertising.

MoMA acquired the *Campbell's Soup Cans* as a single set in 1996; the 32 canvases are still shown together today, in their shelf arrangement.