T i n s

Much ink has been spilt about Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s soup tins and Wikipedia has a summary.  Received with confusion at first, the juncture is now considered as an important contribution to art and to pop art, in particular.

My take is that Warhol and other pop artists were consciously or  unconsciously leaning into the realm of the Absurd.  If one has journeyed through the history of art from the Altamira cave paintings (estimated at 20,000 years, at least) to the Sistene Chapel, to Rembrandt, to Ingres, the 1962 Campbell’s Soup Cans seem like a joke and, perhaps, at some level, they were intended to be jokes.  A desolate kind of humour:  after all the wealth that we have inherited in terms of art, we arrive at a tin of soup!  It is the nadir of inspiration.  There is a horror about it – in primary colours.  Is that Soup Tin a statement or a question, or both?  Is it the death of all dreams and longing, of resonance, of spirituality? 

Ionesco said that our art is the storehouse of our despair.  It seems true for The Tin.  But I, for one, can’t help smiling about it.  It’s crazy and - dare I say it? – funny.  And Warhol is, of course, continuing what was started by some Modernists, the Dadaists, in particular.  Witness putting a moustache on a poster of Mona Lisa.  That’s absurd.

Source
Image - Wikipedia.