National Galleries of Scotland

In the 1980s Warhol began to accept commissions for advertising work from a range of sources. Many critics noted that he had essentially gone full-circle, returning to where he had started in the 1950s as a commercial illustrator. Yet Warhol maintained that he ?was always a commercial artist?. Due to ?his overwhelming identification with the can? in 1985 he was commissioned by Campbell?s Soup to create a series of paintings of their dry-mix soups. This work displays a chicken noodle package, created by combining a photographic print with hand-drawn printed con tours. When Warhol produced the original Campbell?s paintings in the 1960s they were considered outrageous ? twenty years later they appear almost as ordinary as the product they represent.