Portal:Visual arts

Campbell's Soup Cans is a series of 32 paintings produced by American artist Andy Warhol between 1961 and 1962. Each painting depicts a different variety of Campbell's soup cans in a uniform 20-by-16-inch format. First exhibited in July 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the pop art works challenged traditional distinctions between fine art and commercial imagery. Warhol's association with the subject led to his name becoming synonymous with the Campbell's soup cans. The series catapulted Warhol to fame and contributed to critical discourse about originality, reproduction, and the meaning of art in a consumer society.

Drawing on his background as a commercial illustrator, Warhol focused on the packaging of everyday items, making high art of the artistic depiction of the commercial packaging rather than of the everyday items themselves, prompting initial controversy but eventual acclaim. The Campbell's Soup Cans series generally refers to the original 32 canvases, but it also encompasses Warhol's many subsequent variations: approximately 20 similar paintings produced in the early 1960s; a 1965 set of 20 larger multi-colored canvases; numerous related drawings, sketches, and stencils created over the years; and two separate editions of 250 ten-print screen print portfolios issued in 1968 and 1969. The original 32 canvases were preserved by art dealer Irving Blum and later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. (Full article...)

Portrait by Gerhard von Kügelgen, c. 1810–1820

Caspar David Friedrich (German: [ˌkaspaʁ ˌdaːvɪt ˈfʁiːdʁɪç] ^ⓘ; 5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti-classical work, conveys a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings often set contemplative human figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. Art historian Christopher John Murray described their presence, in diminished perspective, amid expansive landscapes, as reducing the figures to a scale that directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

Friedrich was born in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was at the time Swedish Pomerania. He studied in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization". (Full article...)

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