Who Was Andy Warhol?

In July 1962, a new art exhibit opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. When people walked into the gallery, they saw thirty-two paintings lined up on a shelf. They were paintings of cans of Campbell’s soup. Each painting showed a different flavor of soup.

Most people thought the paintings were silly. Critics didn’t think the paintings should even be considered art. An art gallery down the street from the Ferus put real cans of Campbell’s soup in their window with a sign that said: DO NOT BE MISLED. GET THE ORIGINAL. OUR LOW PRICE—TWO FOR 33 CENTS.

Andy Warhol, the artist who painted the soup cans, heard all the jokes. He didn’t care. He liked that people were talking about his work. He even posed for photographs in a grocery store with a shopping cart filled with Campbell’s soup.

He knew his soup can paintings were a different form of art. The 1960s were an exciting time. Why not make art that was fun? Why not paint pictures that celebrated the things that people saw in everyday life?

Very few people were interested in buying the soup can paintings in 1962. But in 1996, almost thirty-five years later, the Museum of Modern Art paid $15 million for thirty-two of them. By then Andy Warhol had become one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. He had changed the way people thought about art. He had created thousands of paintings. He had made movies. He had managed a rock band. People spent time at his studio just so they could seem cool.

Andy said, “In the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” long before the Internet even existed and people could post videos of themselves on YouTube for the world to see. And if there was one thing Andy understood, it was how to be famous. After all, he had turned Andrew Warhola, a poor, shy boy from Pittsburgh, into Andy Warhol: art superstar and international celebrity.