The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andy Warhol · synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, each 50.8 by 40.6 cm (20 by 16 in) · one can of Campbell’s condensed soup on each, frontal and upright on a bare ground, each canvas naming a different variety · 1962 · first shown together at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, July to August 1962 · The Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 1996 · the unit scored is the thirty-two canvases as one work, whole: none lost, none replaced; the first presentation is gone, and the grid of four rows of eight in which they now hang is the museum’s
Mode
The commercial package painted as a painting; the series of near-identical units in place of composition; the work shown and kept as a set of goods
Mythos
Daily bread, the same each day; the plenty of a full product line; the frontal, repeated object on a bare ground, with the structure of the icon and the content of the shelf
Phase
Painted in 1962, before the turn to photographic silkscreen later that year; first shown in July 1962 at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, the painter’s first solo exhibition as a painter
Presentation
Synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, each 50.8 by 40.6 cm; one can per canvas; at the Museum of Modern Art in a grid of four rows of eight, about 325 by 203 cm at the canvas edges before the gaps
Register
Deadpan: evenly lit, without shadow, gesture or drama; recognition before a single canvas, a still litany before the thirty-two
Scale
Each canvas the size of a small window; 6.6 square metres of canvas in all; thirty-two varieties, one product
Governing Proposition
Thirty-two canvases of one size each hold one can of Campbell’s condensed soup, frontal, centred and unshadowed, and nothing changes from canvas to canvas but the name of the variety. The wager of the work is that a mass-produced label, painted at its own scale and repeated through a whole product line, can carry what a nation shares in place of the saints and the landscape; that choice in such a world is a difference of one word inside sameness; and that a painting, made by a hand that hides itself, can stand as a product among products without comment.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Campbell’s Soup Cans was painted by Andy Warhol in 1962. It is synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, each 50.8 by 40.6 centimetres, twenty by sixteen inches. The thirty-two were first shown together at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, from July to August 1962, in the painter’s first solo exhibition as a painter. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired them in 1996, and they hang there now.
The thirty-two were not dispersed. Irving Blum kept the set together rather than selling the canvases one by one, and it is as a set that they survive: none lost, none replaced, none added. The work scored is the thirty-two as one. The arrangement in which they were first seen is gone; the way they hang now is the museum’s decision, not the painter’s.
That they were shown and kept as a set is part of what they are. A painting of a product, made in a series of identical units, was offered to the public as goods are offered, and was kept as a range rather than sold as single choices. The work is a product among products, and it says so by the way it exists.
Movement II
Each canvas holds one can of Campbell’s condensed soup, frontal and upright, centred on a bare ground, at about its own size. The can is evenly lit and casts no shadow. There is no table, no kitchen, no hand to hold it. The red upper half and the white lower half of the label, the script of the name, the round medallion and the band along the foot are the same on every canvas.
What changes is the name of the variety, one or two words. Measured, the share of the field that differs from canvas to canvas is very small, and that small share is what the work turns on. The eye cannot tell the canvases apart at a glance; it has to read. Thirty-two varieties are one product, and choosing among them is a matter of words inside sameness.
How the thirty-two relate to the company’s range is generally said to be one to one, a canvas for each variety on sale in 1962; that is not settled here, and on either account the number was set by a product line and not by an argument the painter built. The set claims completeness all the same. Remove one canvas and no single meaning breaks, but the claim to the whole range does.
Movement III
The cans are painted, not printed. Later in 1962 the painter turned to the photographic silkscreen, and the silkscreen paintings of that year followed within months; this set comes just before, and is hand-made in the look of a printed thing. At a distance the labels read as print. Close up, the hand shows in small irregularities, and the evenness is seen to have been made.
The command is exact and narrow. Lettering is painted cleanly, flat colour laid evenly, the two halves of the label divided cleanly, the medallion and the script held true. The decisions that are the painter’s are few: the scale, the frontality, the bare ground, the number, the format. The design of the label is the company’s, and it is taken whole.
The inheritance was New York painting of the 1950s, in which the gestural mark was the trace of a self and the commercial image was refused. A former commercial illustrator, known as a painter to almost no one, showing in Los Angeles far from the centre, painted a product label at its own scale, without gesture, thirty-two times. The path was opening as he walked it, in Johns’s flags and beer cans, Rauschenberg’s combines, Lichtenstein’s cartoon paintings of 1961, and behind them Duchamp’s readymades and Stuart Davis’s packages. The turn to the series and to the full product line was his own.
Movement IV
Take Tomato, the plainest of the line, and set it beside any other of the thirty-one. They obey one law: one product, one format, one viewpoint, with difference allowed only in the name. Every canvas is that law, and the law holds even through the making, the hand bent to the look of the machine. The range between the two farthest canvases is a word or two.
The can is daily bread, the same each day, the meal of a working nation, and the full line of varieties summons the plenty of a country that offers many kinds of one thing. The frontal, centred, repeated object on a bare ground has the structure of the icon, and some viewers have seen the grid as a wall of icons; that is a reading brought to the work. What the work itself builds is the replacement of the one sacred image by the identical many.
It refuses elevation by design. Before a single canvas the response is recognition and a smile. Before the thirty-two the cans take on a still, hieratic presence, rank on rank, closer to a litany than to transport. The work holds commerce, daily life, the nation and the market for art in one image, and leaves out the person, the family, labour, the state, history and nature. Its subject is a surface, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Movement V
At the Museum of Modern Art the canvases hang in four rows of eight, about 325 by 203 centimetres at their edges before the gaps between them. The grid turns the set into a catalogue on a wall. It is a hanging decision, and the work would be the same work along a different line.
With Lichtenstein’s paintings of 1961 and 1962 the set is the founding statement of Pop, and the image by which Pop is known. Its reach runs through Pop in America and Britain, the serial and the repeated in the decade’s painting and sculpture, appropriation from the 1970s on, and the relation of art to brand and market. Much of that reach belongs to the silkscreens that followed: Marilyn Diptych, on this desk at 8.4, added a person, a death and the screen’s own failures to the method, and each of those lifts an axis this set leaves low. Fountain, at 8.0, is the readymade it descends from, the larger swerve.
After sixty-four years the questions it raised are still open: celebration or critique, abundance or sameness, the hand present or erased, the set or the brand the painter’s name became. Return to the canvases gives the same thing again; the return is in the argument about them. The image has been printed on goods until it risks being seen through its copies. So far the thirty-two, whole and together, have outlived them.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the parts, which are thirty-two near-identical canvases. Inside each the subtractive test barely bites: a frontal can on a bare ground, nothing that could go without the can ceasing to be this can. Across the set it bites differently. Remove one canvas and no single meaning breaks; what breaks is completeness, since the work’s claim is to the full range, and the set was kept together in practice rather than sold singly. The names are the one thing that changes, and they are required: without them the set is one image repeated. What is charged is that the count is borrowed, set by a product line rather than compelled by an argument the painter built, and the painter’s single cans and many-can canvases show the idea surviving at other numbers.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Disclosed through image, and credited fully. What the work brings into the open can be stated. In a culture of mass production, choice is difference inside sameness: thirty-two varieties are one product, and the eye must read words to tell them apart. The thing eaten every day, packaged and branded, is the common visual ground of a nation, as the saints and the landscape once were, and a painting can hold it without comment. And art is a product among products, shown as a set of goods, made by a hand imitating a press. These are meanings, not moods, and they reach a life outside the art world. What holds the axis below the bar is that the work will not say which way its disclosure points, celebration or indictment, and shows the condition as surface more than it opens it from inside.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is refused by design, and that refusal is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The register is deadpan: the cans are frontal, evenly lit, centred, without shadow or drama, and the hand that made them hides itself. What lift there is comes from the set, not the canvas. Seen as thirty-two, rank on rank, the cans take on a still, hieratic presence that some viewers liken to a wall of icons; the effect is real and faint, closer to a litany than to transport. Before any single canvas the response is recognition and a smile. There is no terror, no grandeur of scale, each canvas the size of a small window, and no summit that recurs. The axis sits where the work’s own coolness puts it, at the foot of the range for a work of its standing.
Score: 6.0 / 10
Mostly evoked, and built only by the repetition. The can is daily bread: food that is the same each day, eaten alone, the meal of a working nation. Plenty, the American cornucopia, is summoned by the full line of varieties. The frontal, centred, repeated object on a bare ground has the structure of the icon, and the grid has been likened to an iconostasis; that comparison is brought by readers and is not credited. What the work builds is the replacement of the unique image by the identical many, so that the archetype of the one sacred object is turned into its opposite. Most of the can’s archetypal standing, as the emblem of Pop and of America, came to it by reception, and reception is not credited here. That holds the axis well short of the bar.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The inheritance is New York painting of the 1950s: the large gestural field, the hand as the trace of a self, the refusal of the commercial image. The departure is nearly total. A product label, painted at its own scale, frontal, without gesture, repeated thirty-two times with only the name changed, by a former commercial illustrator, and shown as merchandise. The stake was real: the painter was known as a painter to almost no one, and the show was in Los Angeles, far from the centre. What holds the figure below the top is that the path was opening as he walked it: Johns’s flags and beer cans, Rauschenberg’s combines, Lichtenstein’s cartoon paintings of 1961, and behind them Duchamp’s readymades and Stuart Davis’s packages. The turn to the series and the full product line is his own.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is in the separate, equal canvases: thirty-two units of one size, each an item, so that the set is a catalogue and its hanging a display of goods. Paint the cans on one canvas, as the many-can canvases of the same year do, and the work knows mass rather than choice. Paint one can and it knows the object, not the range. Print them and the irony of the hand imitating the machine is lost; this set knows that the look of a printed thing can be made by a person. Held below the top because the arrangement is not fixed by the maker, and because much of what the work knows survives a change of form, as the later silkscreens and screenprint portfolios show: the idea travels well outside this object.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: sixty-four years of return, and the questions remain open. Celebration or critique of consumer America, and does the work know which? Is it an image of abundance or of sameness? Is the hand present or erased, in canvases that are painted and look printed? What is the work: the set, the idea of the can, or the brand that the painter’s name became? How far does it anticipate the serial structures of Minimal art, and how far does it share them by coincidence? The literature on Pop, on the painter and on the commodity image keeps returning here. What holds the axis below the top is that return to the object yields little: the canvases, once seen, give the same thing again, and the well is chiefly the discourse.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American painting of the early 1960s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a painting could take as its subject and how it could be made: the mass-produced image at its own scale, the series of near-identical units, the suppressed hand, the work as product. With Lichtenstein’s paintings of 1961 and 1962 it is the founding statement of Pop, and the one that became its emblem. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Pop in America and Britain; the serial and the repeated in the decade’s painting and sculpture; appropriation from the 1970s on; the relation of art to brand and market, and much commercial design after it. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the silkscreen practice that followed and to Pop as a movement, and part is shared with Lichtenstein, Johns and Duchamp before them.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-four years. Form: whole. All thirty-two canvases survive and are kept together; none is lost or replaced. The first presentation in Los Angeles is gone, and the hanging since is the museum’s, which takes little. Presence: as wide as any image of its decade, on view at the Museum of Modern Art since 1996 and lent and reproduced before that; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Against it, the image has become a pattern printed on goods, and risks being seen through its copies, though so far the set has outlived them. Fabric: synthetic polymer paint on canvas. The figure stands at the upper end of what its age allows, a tenth below the widest for the lost first showing and the copies.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of painting, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is exact and deliberately narrow: lettering painted cleanly, flat colour laid evenly, the upper and lower halves of the label divided cleanly, the medallion and the script held true. The skill is load-bearing in one respect, a hand made to pass for the press at a distance, with small irregularities visible close up. What holds the figure is range, minimal by design: one viewpoint, one object, flat colour, a design taken whole from a commercial label, and few decisions that are the painter’s own, the scale, the frontality, the bare ground, the number, the format. The design of the can is the company’s and is not credited. A narrow command, precisely used, above a readymade and well below the painters of interval and surface.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Take two distant elements: Tomato, the plainest of the line, and any other of the thirty-one. They obey one law: one product, one format, one viewpoint, with difference allowed only in the name. Every canvas is that law, and where a label carries more words than a name, they are the company’s variation and not the painter’s, so they confirm it. The law holds even through the making, the hand bent to the look of the machine. What holds the axis is that narrowness is not coherence: the range between the farthest elements is a word or two, the territory is one object repeated, and the law, once grasped, governs a field that does not widen as one looks.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The orders held are few, and held by one image. Commerce and industry, in the brand and the product line. Daily life and the body, in food eaten every day. The nation, as a shared visual ground. Art and its market, in the set shown as goods and kept as a set. They are integrated, since the can carries them all at once. What holds the axis low is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour shown, no state, no history, no nature, and no sacred order except as viewers bring it. The work’s subject is a surface, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7. With Lichtenstein’s paintings of the same years the founding statement of Pop, whose reach runs through the serial, appropriation and the relation of art to the market, though much of it belongs to the silkscreens that followed; thirty-two canvases whole and together after sixty-four years, their presence as wide as any image of their decade; and a turn from the gestural self to the product label at its own scale, risked by a painter known as a painter to almost no one, on a path that others were opening at the same time.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 6.0: elevation refused by design, the cans frontal, evenly lit and unshadowed, with a faint litany in the set and recognition before each canvas. Beside it, The Encompassed at 6.2: commerce, daily life, the nation and the market for art held in one image, and the person, the family, labour, the state, history and nature absent. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.0: daily bread and plenty evoked, the icon structure brought by readers, and the can’s standing as an emblem given by reception rather than built. These three hold the work below Tier IV. They are one fact: the work chose a cool surface and a narrow world, and the figures describe the choice.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 7.6, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls short by two tenths and The Archetypal Deep at 7.0 by a point and a half. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 6.0, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.0, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.2. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 94.0, an average of 7.833 that displays as 7.8: the work stands where its aggregate places it, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the thirty-two canvases as they hang at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2026 (synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, each 50.8 by 40.6 cm, 1962, acquired in 1996), and of their documented history; no image or written source was consulted, and the detail of individual canvases is known less well than the format, the number and the history. The work scored is the thirty-two canvases as one work, whole: none lost, none replaced, none added by another hand. The first presentation at the Ferus Gallery in 1962 is gone, and the grid of four rows of eight is the museum’s hanging, not fixed by the painter. The single painted cans and the drawings of 1961 and 1962, the many-can canvases of 1962 (among them 100 Cans and 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans), the silkscreen cans, the screenprint portfolios Campbell’s Soup I (1968) and II (1969) and the later soup boxes and labels are context, and bear on the work only as reach. No words of the painter are quoted. The comparison of the grid to an iconostasis, and readings drawn from the painter’s religious upbringing, are brought from outside and are not credited. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the terms on which the museum acquired the set, the price at which it was first bought and how it was paid, how the canvases were arranged at the Ferus Gallery, the reception of that show in its neighbourhood, whether the thirty-two match the company’s range of 1962 one to one, the order in which the museum hangs the varieties, how the labels were transferred to the canvas, whether any part of the label was stamped rather than painted, which labels carry words beyond the variety’s name, the painter’s own habits of eating the soup, and any record of restoration.