Warholian Soup for Los Angeles

Soup tonight?

Warhol is back in town. Marking the 49th anniversary of their controversial public debut in LA  Warhol’s suite of 32 Canvases, depicting Campbell’s soup, are now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Controversial as ever, the arrival of Warhol’s pop art masterworks has led an over wrought LA Times to suggest that Warhol got the idea of painting soup from William De Kooning. This view originates in De Kooning’s comments in Sketchbook No.1 Three Americans a 1960 movie by Oscar winning filmmaker Robert Snyder. Apparently soup was a common artistic metaphor of the time, used by De Kooning to describe the artistic process. “Everything is already like art—like a big bowl of soup you just stick your hand in and you find something…” Interesting, if nebulous evidence, suggesting that De Kooning was somehow responsible for Warhol’s deification of product as Art.

So what is the true answer? The argument over whether Pop art is a “Joyful celebration of popular culture or a sharp critique of it.” has, as the LA times quite rightly points out, been at the center of the Warholian debate for over fifty years. However the suggestion that Pop Art is: a pointed appraisal of the art establishment’s entrenched status quo and a critique of high cultures supercilious conceits, is as fatuous as Warhol’s suggestion that he painted soup cans because he: “ate it for lunch every day for twenty years.”

Warhol was an obsessive voyeur, a graphic designer and  a supreme scenester  with a overproof sense of irony. As a designer he loved product and yet paradoxically loathed it. As an artist and astute observer of the modern age, he mirrored culture and the reflected image wasn’t always pretty, as those who have seen his films will attest. The most delicious irony is of course, that soup, like art, is open to interpretation and you can either love it or loathe it. Creative Juicings like L.A. loves Warhol. You want soup with that?

http://www.moca.org/