In late 1961 Warhol asked friends for a subject that could carry his new work forward after comic-strip paintings failed to interest a New York dealer. Muriel Latow, who ran a gallery, told him to paint something everyone recognised, something like a soup can^[2]. Warhol did not paint one can. He painted all thirty-two flavours the Campbell Soup Company then sold, documenting the full range rather than picking a single favourite^[2]. Warhol later gave a different account crediting his mother, who made flowers from empty peach tins and sold them door to door during the Depression, though the soup-can story is the one usually repeated^[3]. What both accounts share is the same underlying logic: the subject needed to be instantly, universally known.

Warhol shipped the paintings to Los Angeles and Irving Blum, co-founder of the Ferus Gallery, installed them on a single shelf running along the wall, like tins on a supermarket shelf rather than framed pictures in a row^[1]. The show opened on 9 July 1962. Reaction was mixed and often mocking: a Los Angeles Times cartoon joked about the terrifying intensity of chicken noodle soup, and a nearby dealer in Pre-Columbian art displayed fifty real cans of Campbell's soup in his own window with a sign reading, get the real thing for only 29 cents a can^[1]. Blum, convinced of the work's importance, later bought back individual canvases that collectors, including the actor Dennis Hopper, had already purchased separately, so the full set of thirty-two would stay together, and paid Warhol $1,000 for the complete group in ten monthly instalments^[2].

Despite their subject, the original 1962 Soup Cans were laboriously hand-painted rather than mass-produced. Warhol made deliberate choices about how the tin should catch light, using the same metallic paint associated with Jackson Pollock, and how the label lettering should look, closer to a sign painter's hand than a factory print^[3]. A critic writing at the time called the effect a found object done by hand, and another compared the cans to household gods, domestic objects raised to the status of icons^[3]. Warhol moved to silkscreen printing later that same year, first for dollar-bill imagery shown at another gallery, and the technique became the basis for almost all his later work, allowing him to reproduce an image hundreds of times with only small variations between prints^[3].