Campbell soup is really, really bad! It's disgusting!
Good
soup, the first spoonful is amazing, and it carries you away with
pleasure, and after a while the clouds part and you gently, luxuriously
return to Earth, and you realize that THAT WAS JUST THE FIRST SPOONFUL.
Dozens more await you in the bowl. And I don't just mean fancy expensive soup. Soup in a can or a box from Pacific Foods -- or, for that matter, some of the more upscale options from Campbell's itself, such as some of the varieties of their Slow Kettle Style -- can sometimes be that good. Real gourmet soup in a fancy restaurant can be even better.
Andy
Warhol was weird. Not only did he make many many large and small pictures of
Campbell's soup cans --
pictures which long been considered artistic
masterpieces, and I still don't understand why --- not only did he make
picture of Campbell's soup cans, he continued to eat absolute crap like
Campbell's chicken noodle soup with Nabisco soda crackers for lunch
several times a week after he had become very rich. In the evenings he
would go to the fanciest restaurants in NYC, and I have no idea what his
breakfasts were like.
Maybe those lunches had something to do with keeping a connection to his childhood. Or reminding himself to stay humble. He
grew up in a blue-collar family in Pittsburgh. His dad died in 1942,
when Andy was 14. His mom didn't remarry. In the 1950's he brought his
mom to live with him in NYC, and she would make his lunch of Campbell's
chicken noodle soup and Nabisco crackers, just like when he was a a kid
-- just like my family ate when I was a kid.
Also, every week, he would go and work in a soup kitchen. Where the soup was, possibly, some weeks, much better than Campbell's.
All the evidence seems to indicate that he was a good guy. But he was weird.
To be more exact, the video I'm recommending is entitled "Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture."
True to its title, the video, almost 3 hours long even with the commercials taken out, goes into some detail in the story of Warhol's and his art and the effects of that art, from before his birth, before his parents had migrated from Slovakia to Pittsburgh, to 2002, 15 years after his death, when the program was released. Dozens of people are interviewed, including Andy's brothers James and Paul, and people who worked with Andy when he was a commercial artist, before he had transitioned to fine art, and employees of the Factory in its various incarnations, and collectors including Dennis Hopper, and artists of the New York New Wave whom Andy mentored, including Kenny Scharf and Julian Schnabel. Everybody except Lou Reed who was ever anybody: John Giorno, Billy Name, John Richardson, Mary Woronov, Paul Morrisy, John Cale, Udo Kier, Holly Woodlawn, Ultra Violet, Bob Colacello and other fabulous people all get their say.
I wonder why Lou isn't in the program.
Good insights are provided into all aspects of Andy's life. His brothers, who have sometimes been portrayed harshly in the media, as bumpkins and barbarians and whatnot, in this program just come off as regular guys from Pittsburgh who loved their fragile little brother -- loved him his whole life, and missed him after he was gone. We learn that Andy was beaten up by a girl in his first day at school (By a girl! Isn't that just perfect!) and came home crying. We learn that a couple of years later he was confined to bed for a while with illness -- and with a coloring book his Mom gave him (And isn't that just perfect too). The program delivers a very convincing narrative of how Andy developed from a sickly kid in Pittsburgh who adored Hollywood stars, to a very successful, high-paid graphic artist in New York -- who, unknown to most of his friends, lived with his mother, who cleaned his apartment, and, for example, cooked Campbell's soup for him -- to an artist who, for a few years, only precariously paid the rent, who then, as gay, sunny, witty Pop Art replaced melodramatic, macho, hetero Abstract Expressionism in the early 1960 as The New Thing with the official blessing of the Art World, became a huge star, with his canvasses of Campbell's soup cans and Hollywood stars, and sculptures of Brillo Pad boxes, and all of the other things for which he's famous. And the program also shows interesting art by Warhol which is less well-known.
I came from a family which didn't understand modern painting and sculpture. I gradually came to appreciate it, but Pop Art like Andy's took me an especially long time. "Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture" might be helpful, extremely helpful, to someone who's puzzled by Warhol's art. It would also be helpful to watch the program with an open mind: there are interviews with dozens of people who loved and admired Andy, and they're all very intelligent, and they're not all lying to the viewer about thinking that Andy's art is brilliant.
I mention that they're not all lying about liking Warhol's art, because I know that there are still some people, in the year 2019, who believe that all of the most successful art since about 1860 has been one huge scam: the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, Picasso, Matisse, the Expressionists, the Abstract Expressionists, Pop Art, Postmodernism, whatever you call what came later -- all of it. I know that such people still exist because I'm related to some of them. I don't think that a wonderful 3-hour program like "Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture" would do them much good, because they wouldn't give it a chance. And what a shame that is.
