Campbell's Soup Cans

Thirty-two canvases hang in a row, each painting a single Campbell's soup can, one for every variety the company then sold, lined up like cans on a supermarket shelf. Andy Warhol chose the cheap, ubiquitous product deliberately, draining the work of personal expression to mirror the uniformity of mass consumer culture. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, Campbell's Soup Cans is a founding monument of Pop art - the everyday commercial object presented deadpan as fine art, a provocation that overturned ideas of originality, taste, and what painting was allowed to be about.