ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) BEAN WITH BACON SOUP

Provenance
Leo Castelli Gallery, NEW YORK

Exhibited
MINNEAPOLIS, Locksley Shea Gallery, ANDY WARHOL DRAWINGS, 1975
STUTTGART, Wurttemberisher Kunstverein, ANDY WARHOL: DAS ZEICNERISHE WERK 1942-1975,February 12-March 29, 1976 (traveled to DUSSELDORF, Stadtische Kunsthalle Kunsthalle Bremen MUNICH, Stadtische Galerie im Lembachhaus BERLIN, Haus am Waldsee, VIENNA, Museum Moderner Kunst, Museum das Jahrhunderts and Kunstmuseum Lucerne)

Literature
G. Frei and N. Benezra, eds., THE ANDY WARHOL CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ: PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE 1961-1963, NEW YORK, 2002, p. 112, fig. 85 (illustrated)

Andy Warhol spent the fifties as a successful illustrator, creating advertisements, doing window designs and drawing for newspapers. Even at this early stage of his career he had a very distinct style giving life and poetic grace to every day, banal objects. In the early sixties he reversed the roles abandoning his career as an illustrator and becoming an artists whose works are based on advertisements. Although the exact chronology of Warhols oeuvre cannot be firmly determined it is most plausible that the first series of works from the early sixties were the ones based on newspaper ads and comic strips. These works contain images and often times text thus preserving the context from which they were harvested. Following came the paintings based on consumer products. In these paintings Warhol began to explore the object as the solo focus. In December of 1961 Warhol began his Soup Can series which includes some of his best known images. In this series Andy Warhol made iconocalastic deities of the consumer readymade.

Listed in the catalogue raisonne of Andy Warhol's paintings are three groupings of Campbell Soup Can paintings single-portrait types, serial compositions and still-life subjects. Each grouping is based primarily on the source material for the works contained therein. The present lot, BEAN WITH BACON SOUP falls in the third category of still-lifes. "The still-lifes were based on an extensive series of photographs in which soup cans, dollar bills, and Coca-Cola bottles were subjected to a series of direct actions and simple arrangements, including opening, tearing, crushing, folding, rolling, and stacking. The paintings and drawings based on these photographs aremore painterly and gestural than the portrait types." (G. Frei and N. Printz, eds., THE ANDY WARHOL CATALOGUE RAISONNE, NEW YORK, 2002, p. 64)

The still-life drawings are some of the most expressive works from the Soup Can series. In these works the viewer has a clear sense of the artist's hand, his physical involvement in creating the image. Particularly with BEAN WITH BACON SOUP one can feel the kinetic energy of Warhol's pencil racing across the surface of the paper like a Franz Kline or de Kooning brushstroke. There is an intimacy in the drawing that is not as apparent in the silkscreens.

In addition to the intimacy and kinetic energy there is a sense of violence. The torn label can be seen as a foreshadow to the car crashes and suicides that will soon occupy Warhol's interests or as a prefiguration of the Marilyn Monroe portraits something taken, torn, degraded and then artistically interpreted and idolized. BEAN WITH BACON SOUP is a special relic an intimately handmade work from a series created to project the nature of mass culture-a series that has become an icon of Pop Art and of Andy Warhol himself.