[1] The works were Warhol's hand-painted depictions of printed imagery deriving from commercial products and popular culture and belong to the pop art movement.

The subject matter initially caused offense, in part for its affront to the technique and philosophy of the earlier art movement of abstract expressionism.

In addition, there is ongoing production and sale of unauthorized screen prints, of what is legally Warhol's intellectual property, as a result of a falling out with former employees.

The popular explanation of his choice of the Campbell's Soup cans theme is that one artistic acquaintance inspired the original series with a suggestion that brought him closer to his roots.

Warhol arrived in New York City in 1949, directly from the School of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute of Technology,[10] and he quickly achieved success as a commercial illustrator.

[12] By 1955, with the hired assistance of Nathan Gluck, Warhol was tracing photographs borrowed from the New York Public Library's photo collection and reproducing them with a process he had developed earlier as a collegian at Carnegie Tech.

[41] He was also a bit of a surprise choice over Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, and George Segal, who had already presented pop art shows that had been reviewed.

[53][54] Another detractor, the nearby Primus Stuart Gallery, stacked a pyramid of real Campbell's Soup cans in the window below a sign that read "Do Not Be Misled.

[55] Few actually saw the paintings at the Los Angeles exhibit or at Warhol's studio, but word spread, as controversy and scandal, due to the work's seeming attempt to replicate the appearance of manufactured objects.

[56] Extended debate on the merits and ethics of focusing one's efforts on such a mundane commercial, inanimate object kept Warhol's work at the center of art world conversations.

[60] Blake Gopnik describes the result as not "...bad for radical new pictures in an unknown and weirdly repetitive style by an artist with zero name recognition and no local ties.

[59][61] He retained possession of the work for over 25 years, generally keeping them in the original special slotted crate, except for the occasional home display in his own dining room.

Regarding some of Warhol's Campbell's Soup can paintings, the review stated, "These are no mere unruly incidents but big steps towards art that is socially to the point.

"[82] During the first week of the July 1962 Ferus Gallery exhibition, Campbell's Soup CEO William Murphy sent a team of legal representatives to evaluate the "use and violation of trademarks".

[84] In January 1967, the company took legal action against Warhol for using a soup can label, without consent, for an Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, show announcement.

[83] That year, the company celebrated the 50th anniversary of the series by partnering with Target Corporation to release four different Warhol-inspired, limited-edition designs of condensed tomato soup cans (pictured left) in its United States stores.

E.g., in a majority opinion, Stephen Breyer noted in a computer-code case that "An 'artistic painting' might, for example, fall within the scope of fair use even though it precisely replicates a copyrighted 'advertising logo to make a comment about consumerism'".

[91] Wallowitch's photographs served as the models for the tracing and copying that resulted in many of his 1961 and 1962 Campbell's Soup cans and dollar bill paintings and drawings.

When the art critic G. R. Swenson asked Warhol in 1963 why he painted soup cans, the artist replied, "I used to drink it, I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years.

[48] The soup is said to have reminded Warhol of his mother, Julia, who served it to him regularly while raising him during the Great Depression, as Czech immigrants in a Pennsylvania coal mine town.

[116][117] Warhol's view is encapsulated[41] in the Time magazine description of the "Slice of Cake School", that "... a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed to canvas, become Art.

[116] Contrasting against Caravaggio's sensual baskets of fruit, Chardin's plush peaches, or Cézanne's vibrant arrangements of apples, the mundane Campbell's Soup Cans gave the art world a chill.

Furthermore, the idea of isolating eminently recognizable pop culture items was ridiculous enough to the art world that both the merits and ethics of the work were perfectly reasonably debatable topics, even for those who had not seen the piece.

[61] In 1965, Warhol revisited the Campbell's Soup cans theme while arbitrarily replacing the original red and white colors with a wider variety of hues.

[151] In 1970, Warhol entered into a collaboration in which he facilitated exact duplications of some of his 1960s works by providing the photo negatives, precise color codes, screens, and film matrixes for European screenprint production.

[153] Art galleries and dealers market "Sunday B Morning" reprints of several screenprint works, including those from the Campbell's Soup can sets.

[161] This record was broken a few months later by Warhol's rival for the art world's attention and approval, Lichtenstein, who sold a depiction of a giant brush stroke, Big Painting No.

[175] In many of the works, including the original series, Warhol drastically simplified the gold medallion that appears on Campbell's Soup cans by replacing the paired allegorical figures with a flat yellow disk.

[178] In March 2021 in Manhattan, a Campbell's Soup Cans lithograph worth tens of thousands of dollars was stolen from art curator Gil Traub.

[180] Irving Blum made the original thirty-two canvases available to the public through an arrangement with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, by placing them on permanent loan on February 20, 1987, which was two days before Warhol's death.