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It is one of the most enduring icons in modern art. Yet for 40 years after it first graced one of his prints, Andy Warhol's obsession with the Campbell's soup tin confounded critics and academics alike.
Now a new TV documentary will finally lift the lid on why the image of the mass-produced tin can dominated so much of the legendary pop artist's work. Far from celebrating consumerism, as has been supposed, it claims the object held a more prosaic significance for Warhol: it reminded him of his mother Julia.
According to relatives interviewed for the programme, the painter's love of Campbell's soup stemmed from his memories of being served it daily while growing up in a Pennsylvania mining town in the 1930s. The son of impoverished Czech immigrants, he came to associate the soup with a sense...