Andy Warhol‘s Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box (1964) is a painted and screenprinted wooden sculpture. It replicates a cardboard shipping crate used for Campbell’s Tomato Juice, complete with bold red panels, yellow borders, and black lettering. Measuring the scale of the actual box, the work looks like something straight from a grocery storeroom. By turning a mass-produced package into art, Warhol blurred the line between commercial object and fine art.
Warhol created about 100 of these wooden box sculptures at The Factory in 1964. Assistants helped him silkscreen the Campbell’s graphics onto the surfaces. This particular box was gifted by fashion designer Roy Halston to the Leo Castelli Gallery. It later entered the collection of the Edmundson Art Foundation and was auctioned at Sotheby’s to benefit the Des Moines Art Center. Revolver Gallery acquired it in 2016.
Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box by Andy Warhol as Part of his Larger Body of Work
Warhol admired Marcel Duchamp, but he approached mass-produced objects differently. When he asked his assistant, Nathan Gluck, to pick up cardboard boxes from the supermarket, the artist wasn’t pleased with the elegant designs on the boxes he received. Andy wanted something more common. Duchamp rejected aesthetics to “liberate art from the eye.” Warhol instead embraced American consumerism. He celebrated the sameness of everyday products and the predictability of their taste. For Warhol, this cultural repetition revealed the truth of modern life.
By reproducing Campbell’s packaging, Warhol shifted attention from originality to cultural commentary. His art asked viewers to reconsider the meaning of consumer goods. In The Factory, Warhol produced dozens of box sculptures, including Brillo Pads, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and Coke cartons. These works sparked debates on originality and authorship, cementing Warhol’s role as a provocateur of Pop Art.
PROVENANCE:
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Roy Halston Frowick, New York
Edmunson Art Foundation
Sotheby’s, New York, 4 October 1990, Lot 202 (consigned by the above)
Private Collection
Acquired by Revolver Gallery in 2016
LITERATURE:
Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York and Washington 1970, cat. no. 640, p. 282, illustrated
Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Sculptures, 1964-1969, Vol.
2A, New York 2004, cat. no. 834, p. 94
