On February 22, 1987, Andy Warhol died at age 58 following a gall-bladder operation at New York Hospital. That day, in something of a cosmic coincidence, Irving Blum, the Los Angeles gallerist who in 1962 had given Warhol his first solo exhibition as a fine artist, was busy preparing to ship the 32 paintings from that show to the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C. For 25 years, Blum had owned the works (each 20 inches tall by 16 inches wide), keeping them in their original slotted crate and occasionally hanging them in his dining room in a large grid (four rows of seven or eight across), often to his guests’ great amusement. They depicted soup cans—more to the point, the 32 varieties of Campbell’s condensed soup that were available in 1962, from Bean with Bacon to Vegetarian Vegetable. Blum, visiting the artist at his Manhattan town house in the spring of that year and watching him work on the paintings while pop songs and arias blared simultaneously from a record player and a radio, took the chance of inviting the relatively unknown Warhol to show the whole set at his Ferus Gallery, on North La Cienega Boulevard.

Warhol hesitated. L.A. was terra incognita; New York was where the action was. Blum realized he had to come up with a lure, and he took note of a photo of Marilyn Monroe—a soon-to-be Warhol subject—that the artist had clipped from a magazine. “I thought he was a tiny bit movie struck,” Blum recalls with gusto, reciting the details, which have the sturdy flavor of a folk tale. “I said, ‘Andy, movie stars come into the gallery.’ And he said, ‘Wow! Let’s do it!’ The truth was that movie stars”—with the exception of the art-besotted Dennis Hopper—“never came into the gallery.”

Blum, who turns 88 this year but retains his imposingly upright posture and sonorous, Cary Grant-inflected voice, also might have sensed that Warhol was desperate. For years, the 33-year-old, Pittsburgh-born commercial artist had been trying to get traction with a New York gallery, to no avail. The fine-art world viewed him as a preposterous character better suited to filing colorful drawings for Glamour and the like. What’s more, Warhol had just ended his long-running, lucrative association with the shoe company I. Miller, for which he’d created award-winning, nubbly lined illustrations. Billy Al Bengston, one of the artists who helped put Ferus on the map, and who also showed in New York, befriended Warhol in the mid-1950s and remembered him hanging around the margins. “He was a creepy son of a bitch,” he says. “I liked him.”

In 1961, Warhol believed he was about to have his big breakthrough with a batch of paintings inspired by comic books, but Roy Lichtenstein had beaten him to the punch. “He did it so much better,” Warhol admitted. He needed a new idea. A friend, the interior designer Muriel Latow, charged Warhol $50 for one: make paintings of money, she said. And she tossed in a second idea for free: Campbell’s. Her instincts—and Blum’s—were perfectly attuned to the materialistic climate, and well timed. The Pop-Art Express was just about to leave the station: Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg were already on board, taking on real subjects from commercial culture and leaving Abstract Expressionism, with its brushy and brooding explorations of the self, behind.

What ensued at Ferus, which opened its show of Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s-soup-can paintings on July 9, 1962 (the same week the first Walmart opened and the United States conducted a high-altitude nuclear test over the Pacific Ocean), became an indelible chapter in the cosmology of modern American art. It was a big-bang moment for Pop and for everything that came after. It was also the big-bang moment for the artist himself: the night Warhol became Warhol. It was pre-Factory, pre-Solanas, pre-society portraits, pre-Studio 54, pre-Interview. Fifty-six years after that first Warhol show, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art will open the latest one, on November 12, “Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again.” It’s the first American-organized Warhol retrospective since the Museum of Modern Art’s, 29 years ago.

The more than 350 pieces on view, across all media, will finally allow museum-goers to survey in full the career of the inscrutable, bewigged artist whose image is about as familiar as Bugs Bunny’s. The show will likely attract more eyeballs than any New York art event in recent memory. And those eyeballs will inevitably gravitate toward the suite of 32 soup-can paintings. “It’s the most iconic,” says Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator and deputy director for programs, who spearheaded the retrospective. “When you’re thinking of Pop art, of Warhol, you’re thinking of the soup can.”

“Warhol has now been gone for more than 30 years,” Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg writes in the show’s catalogue, “yet the Warholian view of the world endures.” That worldview made its debut at Ferus on a balmy Monday night in the summer of 1962. Irving Blum had made the decision to display the paintings single file along narrow ledges that, to some, evoked supermarket shelves. It was also a hell of a lot easier than getting out a bubble level and evenly hanging 32 identically sized pictures. Bengston says that he and another Ferus artist, Robert Irwin, were called upon to hang the show; the gallery was hands-on like that. Blum priced the paintings at $100 each: Warhol would get $50 a pop. Monthly gallery rent was $60.

Ferus was known for its big personalities and raucous openings full of noise and smoke. Warhol didn’t make it to the show, but a number of important artists did. Ed Ruscha, also represented by Ferus, recalls that he found the exhibition “shocking.” The stark red-white-and-gold design, which Campbell’s had introduced in 1898, inspired by Cornell’s football uniforms, seemed to glow—blank, goofy, sinister—on the gallery walls. “They were meant to be bad and they were meant to be badass,” Ruscha says. “They were jarring.” (He was desperate to buy one but couldn’t afford the $50 in-house discount price.)

For Bengston, the pictures were “just boring.” In fact, he says, “I still think they’re boring.” Blum remembers Bengston saying he’d already “done soup cans” in art school and stalking out of the opening; Bengston says there’s no way that happened. Conceptual artist John Baldessari checked out the show and thought, perhaps liberatingly: “Wow, I guess he thinks he can get away with this.” He came to feel that “everything Warhol did later was already there in the soup cans.”

The 32 paintings looked to be machine made, yet no two—Scotch Broth, Green Pea, Black Bean—were exactly alike. Warhol’s fastidious craft—the clever use of projections, hand-applied casein paint, a homemade stamp cut from a gum eraser for the cans’ gold fleur-de-lis pattern—had created something that looked eerily like mechanical production, but not quite. Warhol liked to deploy the catchy sound bite “I want to be a machine.” If this was an artist’s exercise in being a machine, it was one in which the artist’s hand made the machine human.

The press went nuts. The Los Angeles Times ran a cartoon with one Beatnik art-lover saying to another, “Frankly, the Cream of Asparagus does nothing for me, but the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodle gives me a real Zen feeling.” Columnist Jack Smith suspected Warhol of having “his tongue in his cheek.” (You think?) Blum patiently informed Smith that the paintings were “terrifying, Kafka-esque.” Passionate belief or sales blather? “I took them very seriously,” Blum says, “and I took Andy seriously.” But it all made for easy parody. The Primus-Stuart Gallery, up the street, got into the act, stacking actual Campbell’s-soup cans in its window, topped with Turkey Vegetable and affixed with a sign: DO NOT BE MISLED. GET THE ORIGINAL. OUR LOW PRICE—TWO FOR 33 CENTS. Artforum’s write-up framed the show as campy 1930s nostalgia. The reviewer had a clear favorite: Onion.

The young Australian critic Robert Hughes pondered the stance of the Pop artist. “His tribute to the blank uniformity of mass culture,” he wrote in 1965, “is a cool, detached reflection of it.” It’s a spot-on appraisal of the sphinx-like Warholian gaze. Hughes didn’t mean it kindly. He saw the pose as a dereliction of the artist’s contrarian duty. Here, then, is the eternal oscillation of Warhol’s work, which was set in motion at Ferus: Is it a celebration of consumerism and its shallow shadow world of manufactured appearances? Or a damning critique? Warhol, I’d venture, wanted it both ways, blithely tossing that dichotomy into the art-history recycling bin like an empty can of Minestrone. And if he was trying to say that art itself was becoming a commodity, then he nailed it.

Warhol’s cans—and he would continue playing with their iterations for decades—have been cited as the most meaningful development in still life since Cézanne, turning supermarket items into non-spatial pseudo-objects: pure, streamlined surface. They have been seen as icons, in the sense of religious art, traceable to Warhol’s roots in the Byzantine Catholic Church, and as landmarks in bringing the camp sensibility—gay, working class—into high art. Walter Hopps, the legendary curator who co-founded Ferus, asked Warhol about the paintings. “He gave me a funny smile,” Hopps recalled in his posthumous 2017 memoir, The Dream Colony, “and he said, ‘I think they’re portraits, don’t you?’”

The remark suggested a sly conflation of humans and the products they consumed. And Warhol certainly consumed the stuff. “I used to drink it,” he said. “The same lunch every day, for 20 years”—typically heated up by his mother, Julia Warhola, who left Pittsburgh (her son would eventually be laid to rest in the suburb of Bethel Park) to come live with him on Lexington Avenue. Warhol’s trusted lieutenant, the poet Gerard Malanga, has pointed out that the seemingly impersonal series is, in fact, deeply autobiographical. Home, Mom, and the American dream of assimilation: these were powerful notions for Warhol, the son of Slovak immigrants. (In late 1961, he gave one of the few pre-Ferus soup-can paintings, Pepper Pot—a variety Campbell’s discontinued in 2010—to his oldest brother, Paul Warhola. In 2002 it sold for $1.2 million.) There’s another take. When a friend asked Warhol in 1962 why on earth he chose to paint soup cans, the artist supposedly said, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.”

By the time the show closed, on Saturday, August 4 (the day before Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose), only five of the paintings had found buyers. Dennis Hopper had been the first, earmarking Tomato before the show opened and gushing about it to his somewhat mystified wife, Brooke Hayward, as she lay in the hospital, having just given birth to their daughter, Marin. (“It’s going in the kitchen!” she told him.) For Hopper, it was art’s long-awaited “return to reality”—actual subject matter, drawn from life. But despite Blum’s unwavering excitement, there were no further sales, and so he got the notion to keep the 32 paintings together as a set. He pitched the idea to Warhol. “If you want to do that, that’s wonderful,” Warhol told him. Blum, known for his plummy charm, needed to pour it on in order to persuade the five committed buyers to back off. He prevailed, but not without some agita. The L.A. collector Donald Factor, who claimed to have also chosen Tomato, never forgave him. Blum admits there was “a certain amount of anger” through the years, as Warhol asking prices shot into the stratosphere. “But,” he says, “who knew that at the time?”

Blum dutifully sent Warhol the agreed-upon 10 monthly installments of $100 to keep the set intact—$1,000 total, $31.25 a painting. They went straight onto the wall of Blum’s Fountain Avenue apartment; he wrote to Warhol, saying, “They are . . . a constant source of stimulation and pure pleasure.” By keeping them together, Warhol and Blum had pulled off a kind of checkbook collaboration, and a fateful one. The 32 cans could now be considered a single work, the first example of the seriality and repetition for which Warhol is best known. The artist next moved straight into what De Salvo calls the “bingo moment,” using the silkscreen process to actually machine-produce fine art: the iconic Marilyns and Elvises and Jackies, the car crashes and electric chairs.

The Campbell’s-soup cans cued that up. They had all the earmarks of what became the Warhol brand: a clear and audacious idea carried out in a clear and audacious way. As writer and visual artist Gary Indiana put it, the Campbell’s series “condensed, like canned soup, what Pop Art had been seeking.” And also what Warhol had been seeking. “Andy was the first artist I ever met who cared about fame,” Bengston recalls. “He cared more about fame than he did aesthetics or anything else.”

The soup labels were a logo as much for the artist as for Campbell’s, and Warhol would soon become the biggest art celebrity since Picasso. Time magazine gave the cans a shout-out. Warhol gamely posed for photos in a supermarket surrounded by Campbell’s. In 1967, the advertising visionary George Lois, a friend of Warhol’s going back to the 50s, booked him for a Braniff Airways commercial. Warhol is seen chattering away to his seatmate: “Of course, remember, there’s an inherent beauty in soup cans that Michelangelo could not have imagined existed.” His baffled seatmate is former heavyweight champ Sonny Liston.

It wasn’t a stretch, then, when Lois, who’d been creating era-defining covers for Esquire, reached out to Warhol again, in early 1969. “I called Andy,” Lois remembers. “I said, ‘Andy! George Lois! I’m gonna put you on the cover of Esquire.’” Lois heard a gleeful Warhol shout to the Factory crowd: “He’s gonna put me on the cover of the magazine!” Then a skeptical pause. “Wait a minute, George. I know you. What’s the idea?”

“I’m gonna do a cover of you fuckin’ drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.”

Warhol was ecstatic. “Are you gonna have to build a giant can of soup?” he asked. The classic May 1969 cover—Warhol sucked into a vortex of tomato soup—is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. “Andy Warhol being devoured by fame!” Lois exclaims.

The cover helped fix Warhol forever as the soup guy—“for good and bad,” the Whitney’s Donna De Salvo says. Campbell’s had threatened copyright-infringement litigation following the Ferus show. But soon the company was love-bombing Warhol with collegial letters and free soup by the crateful, and, in October 1964, commissioned a silkscreened Tomato-soup-can picture from him. In 1967, Campbell’s introduced its promotional Souper Dress, a bit of disposable, Warhol-inspired Pop art: a paper dress emblazoned with soup cans, offered for one dollar plus two labels. If you’re lucky enough to find one for sale today, it will run you upwards of $8,000. Over the years, Campbell’s had Warhol do paintings of its soup-mix boxes, issued limited-edition Warhol cans, and adorned the boardroom of its corporate headquarters, in Camden, New Jersey, with an original Warhol Campbell’s tomato-soup-can painting—where it still hangs. “Warhol helped make Campbell’s the American icon it is today,” Sarah Rice, the company’s corporate archivist, says. “We’ve had a great partnership with the Warhol Foundation.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving: When you’ve got a can of Campbell’s in your pantry, you feel you’ve stocked a bit of edible art history. No marketing consultancy could do it better.

Blum didn’t know it back then, but he did have the prophetic last laugh when he told the L.A. Times, in 1962, “Of their importance in the history of art—we shall have to wait and see.” For years, he dreamed of forking the lot over to MoMA. “It took me a long time to persuade them,” Blum says. By 1996, MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe had taken an interest and helped push through the combined gift and sale of the 32 “Ferus Type” Campbell’s-soup cans to the museum for $15 million, $468,750 a can. (MoMA displays the pictures in Blum’s four-by-eight grid, as will the Whitney.) In 2012, Blum estimated the combined value at $200 million, which, if anything, was a lowball. Warhol’s Small Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Pepper Pot) has fetched $11.8 million. (Two years ago, seven screen-print versions were lifted from the Springfield Art Museum, in Missouri; they remain at large.)

Seeing the full array of the 1962 cans now, one can’t help but consider where we are a half-century after the Ferus show: a global marketplace that is largely unapologetic about consumerism; the onward push of branding; social media’s totalizing sizzle of marketing, even in our ostensibly private lives; the consummation of Warhol’s alleged prophecy that, “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

“My work won’t last anyway. I was using cheap paint,” Warhol quipped in 1966, daring us, as ever, to take him seriously (or un-seriously) at our peril. Yet the soup cans have lasted, and another generation now encounters them; surely some visitors will see them—among the most familiar images in modern American art—for the first time at the Whitney. Will they seem nihilistic? Quaint? Campy? Will they provoke dialogue about assimilation, food policy, G.M.O.’s? Will they still appear to be about nothing and everything? Does such a koan-like art conundrum now seem dated and contrived? “I don’t think it’ll ever be resolved,” De Salvo says. “I think we’ll forever be arguing about those soup cans—which is a hallmark of a great work of art.”

“If Andy were alive today and decided to repaint those soup cans,” Ruscha says, “he would do it in such a way that would be shocking.” It’s not hard to imagine Warhol doing just that. “I should have just done the Campbell’s soups and kept on doing them,” he once said, “because everybody only does one painting anyway.”

In February 1987, when Andy Warhol left his studio for the last time, keeping an appointment for the operation from which he would never recover, he left behind what was potentially a couple of decades’ worth of unfinished work. One artifact propped amid the odds and ends was an enlarged image of a Campbell’s-soup label, Chicken Noodle. That variety, and Tomato, are the cans most commonly left as offerings at the artist’s grave.

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