Mountain Views News          Saturday, October 9, 2010

16

F.Y.I.

 MountainViews-News Saturday, October 9, 2010 

 


A gift of important works by Andy Warhol will 
come to The Huntington Library, Art Collections, 
and Botanical Gardens from the estate of Los 
Angeles gallery director Robert Shapazian, who died 
earlier this year. One of the pieces is Small Crushed 
Campbell’s Soup Can (Beef Noodle), a painting made 
in 1962 as a unique, early variant of the famous series. 
Another is Brillo Box, constructed in 1964 at the time 
of the artist’s first sculpture exhibition; and rounding 
out the gift is a group of nine unlicensed copies of 
Brillo Box commissioned in 1990 by art collector and 
international museum director Pontus Hulten (1924–
2006). The works will come to The Huntington later 
this fall.

 Shapazian, a respected scholar and founding director 
of Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, was introduced to 
The Huntington through the Sam Francis Foundation, 
which donated Francis’ monumental painting Free 
Floating Clouds to The Huntington’s collections in 
2009. Shapazian also was the director of Lapis Press in 
Venice, Calif., founded by Francis to publish limited 
editions of artists’ books.

 “The Shapazian gift of these pivotal works of 
American art is transformative,” said Steven S. Koblik, 
president of The Huntington. “It makes it possible for 
us to dramatically strengthen the narrative we have 
begun in the new American art galleries.”

 The Huntington’s collection of American art, 
established in 1979 with a gift of 50 paintings from 
the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation, has grown to 
comprise more than 10,000 objects spanning the 
colonial period to the mid-20th century. The gallery 
space for American art at The Huntington recently 
doubled with a major expansion and reinstallation 
that opened in 2009.

Soup Cans and the Birth of Pop Art

One of the leading American artists of the 20th 
century, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was a painter, 
printer, and filmmaker whose name has become 
synonymous with the Pop Art movement that began 
in the 1960s. He was trained as a commercial artist 
and began painting in earnest around 1961—at first 
using the popular iconography of advertisements and 
comic books in a style that was loosely related to the 
gestural painting of the abstract expressionists, with 
splashes and drips. But his style changed radically 
when he adopted Campbell Soup cans as his subject.

 Smith points out how the Soup Can paintings are 
transitional. “They marked a change in Warhol’s work 
from a style that was crude, personal, and painterly, to 
one that expressed the bright colors and crisper edges 
of what came to characterize Pop Art,” she said. “Also, 
they are painstakingly hand-made—not printed—and 
of a relatively small scale.”

 Campbell’s Soup was an icon of stability in the 
early 1960s—the 
label design had not 
changed in more than 
50 years, and the price 
of a can had remained 
the same for almost 
40 years. The can 
evoked a comfortable 
familiarity and 
represented 
a common 
denominator of 
experience across 
every age and class 
in the country. Yet, 
Warhol’s Soup Can 
paintings intended 
to provoke anxiety 
about value. What at 
first might appear as 
a crass joke is, at the same time, a sophisticated and 
serious artistic statement. 

 Painted early in 1962, Small Crushed Campbell’s 
Soup Can (Beef Noodle), is a rare black-background 
variant of the famous series of 32 paintings that 
debuted at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles that year—an 
exhibition that is associated with the birth of the Pop 
Art movement. 

 At The Huntington, it will be installed in a room 
in the American art galleries devoted to works made 
after World War II, which is anchored by Free Floating 
Clouds and includes works by Robert Motherwell, 
Helen Frankenthaler, and California artists such as Ed 
Ruscha and Karl Benjamin.

 

Brillo Boxes 

Warhol’s first sculpture exhibition was in the spring 
of 1964 at the Stable Gallery in New York, featuring 
several series of box constructions, including Del 
Monte Peach Halves, Mott's Apple Juice, Kellogg's 
Cornflakes, and Brillo. 

 Warhol’s 1964 Brillo boxes, including the one coming 
to The Huntington, were made of silkscreened ink 
and house paint on plywood and measure 17 by 
17 by 14 inches. In 1990, Pontus Hulten, who had 
worked closely with Warhol in 1968 on the artist’s 
first retrospective, commissioned about 100 further 
versions of the boxes—nine of which have come to 
The Huntington. While they were made without the 
artist’s license, they are included in Warhol’s catalogue 
raisonné. They differ from the original 1964 boxes 
only slightly, most obviously in size (they are 17 ••• by 
14 ••• by 17 ••• inches).

 

About The Huntington The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and 
Botanical Gardens is a collections-based research and educational 
institution serving scholars and the general public. Information: 626-
405-2100 or www.huntington.org.


IMPORTANT WORKS BY ANDY 
WARHOL COME TO THE HUNTINGTON

Andy Warhol, Small Crushed 
Campbell’s Soup Can (Beef 
Noodle), 1962. 20 x 16 in. 
Casein and pencil on linen. 
© 2010 The Andy Warhol 
Foundation for the Visual 
Art/Artists Rights Society 
(ARS), New York.


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