a commercial artist that Warhol developed an awareness that art was represented in the common, ordinary images that are mass produced through advertising media. Warhol used this idea to create his most strongly recognized and critically acclaimed works. Among these were his paintings of Campbell soup cans. The soup cans, a concrete symbol of American productivity, wholesomeness, and middle-class tastes, lose all of these qualities when shown in a mass produced fashion as in Warhol's 200 Soup Cans.
One painting, entitled 100 Soup Cans portrays numbers of cans, all labeled with the same flavor: beef noodle. 200 Soup Cans port paintings are very similar, perhaps making the point that a mass-produced society creates mass-produced and nearly indistinguishable images. Despite what might be termed a multiplicity of flavors that Campbel's soup offers, from the outside, the products look identical. As one critic sums up 200 Soup Cans, "Campbel's canned soups - Warhol seems ironically to assert - are like people; their names, sexes, ages, origins, tastes and passions may well be different, but an advanced consumer-oriented, technological society squeezes them all into the same vat" (Coplans 50).
With the many silkscreens that Warhol did of actors and public figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, he reduces a heroic image to the equivalent of a soup can. His mass production of the
...