Christopher Makos

In 1962, when he painted Campbell’s Soup Cans, Andy Warhol was not yet a household name, and Pop art, the movement with which he is now identified, was still on the cusp of becoming a phenomenon. With the Soup Cans—32 nearly identical canvases, each one featuring a different variety of Campbell’s soup—Warhol hit upon a combination of subject, style and strategy that he would carry forward as his trademark. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Starr Figura examines the ways in which the Soup Cans mark a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, and Warhol’s profound impact on art-making.

Andy Warhol: The Mechanical Art highlights how Andy Warhol (1928–87) explored the cult of merchandise and consumerism, sensitively tracking how the mechanical had morphed from the industrial inventions of the 19th century into something new.

Always attentive to technical and industrial breakthroughs, Warhol used all types of techniques and machinery, from silk-screen printing to video recording, with production patterns that he himself defined as "pertaining to an assembly line." Deliberately seeking an impersonal, mechanical art in a creative subversion of traditional expectations for art and its makers, Warhol traded in transfers, copies, projections and repetitions.

This catalog brings together a selection of more than 250 works by Warhol, focusing on the technical and conceptual evolution of art in New York in the second half of the 20th century. It also includes portraits of the artist by photographers Alberto Schommer, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe. Essays by Robert Rosenblum, Peter Schjeldahl, Rosalind Krauss and an interview conducted by Benjamin Buchloh delve into Warhol's creative and production processes.