paintings at a Los Angeles gallery, one for each flavor of soup then in production.Thus began a decades-long hate-love relationship between the artist and company. It started with immense skepticism, but Campbell eventually grew to embrace the artwork and even sponsored aCampbell's eventual partnership with the Warhol estate presaged the convergence of high art, advertising, branding and fashion that's commonplace today.
Warhol, born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, the son of Slovakian immigrants, was still better known as a commercial illustrator for shoe brands and department stores than as a fine artist. The gallery dealer Irving Blum decided the paintings might be worth more as a group someday and bought them all back. It would prove to be prescient.and, with Elvis and Marilyn replacing Onion and Tomato, that show sold out.
Some argued the work was an acrid but intelligent criticism of mass-production, even of capitalism, while others saw a more comforting wall of soup, more about America and post-war options and prosperity.