Unique drawing on original A4 size Interview Magazine envelope (LA office), a 'Hollywood' flavour soup can drawing, additionally dedicated and signed by Andy Warhol.

Few images in postwar art are as indelibly linked to a single artist as the soup can is to Andy Warhol. Since their first appearance in 1962, Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans have transcended their status as painted reproductions of a kitchen staple to become universal emblems of Pop Art and, more broadly, of the transformation of consumer culture into high art. In the present work, 'Hollywood Soup Can' ('to Samuel), executed in 1982, Warhol revisits this foundational iconography with characteristic wit, reimagining it not as a nod to Campbell’s but instead as a “Hollywood Soup”—a playful conflation of his enduring motifs: celebrity, commerce, and the allure of American mass culture.

Executed in black felt pen with the brisk economy of line that defined his works on paper, Hollywood Soup Can is at once instantly recognizable and distinctly personal. Unlike the serial precision of his early 1960s canvases, this drawing is intimate and improvised, carrying with it the immediacy of a hand-drawn dedication. Inscribed “to Samuel” at the top and signed at the bottom, the sheet becomes both a work of art and a social gesture, emblematic of Warhol’s role as a consummate networker within the overlapping worlds of art, fashion, music, and Hollywood.

The medium itself—a repurposed Interview magazine envelope—adds another layer of resonance. Founded by Warhol in 1969, Interview was dubbed the “Crystal Ball of Pop” and became a cornerstone of his cultural enterprise. More than just a magazine, it was an extension of Warhol’s studio practice and a vehicle for the celebrity fascination that animated his art. By executing the present drawing on an Interview envelope, Warhol collapses his artistic iconography, his publishing activities, and his social correspondence into a single artifact. The effect is one of immediacy and authenticity: a drawing not conceived for formal exhibition, but as a personal token that nonetheless embodies the essence of Warhol’s cultural project.

The year 1982 was a particularly rich one for Warhol. While continuing to produce portraits of society figures, celebrities, and collectors, he was also revisiting earlier themes and collaborating with a younger generation of artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. This period saw him consciously re-engage with the motifs of his early Pop triumphs, reasserting their relevance two decades later in a transformed art world. Hollywood Soup Can must be understood within this context: it is both a playful homage to his 1960s breakthrough and a knowing reminder of his position as Pop’s enduring figurehead.

The substitution of “Hollywood” for “Campbell’s” underscores the thematic shift from the supermarket shelf to the world of celebrity culture—a shift that had in fact been latent in Warhol’s work from the beginning. Just as Campbell’s Soup symbolized the ubiquity of consumer goods in postwar America, “Hollywood Soup” embodies the equally pervasive presence of celebrity in the late 20th century. For Warhol, both were commodities, endlessly reproducible and consumed by the public at large.

What distinguishes the present work is its hybrid nature: both a drawing and a dedication, both casual and canonical. The personal inscription “to Samuel” emphasizes the social dimension of Warhol’s practice, in which art and life, gift and artwork, often intertwined. As such, Hollywood Soup Can is more than a drawing: it is a document of Warhol’s unique ability to transform the most everyday or ephemeral contexts—an envelope, a sketch, a casual inscription—into lasting works of art.

In the broader sweep of Warhol’s oeuvre, works such as Hollywood Soup Can hold a special resonance for collectors. They are rare, personal, and imbued with the immediacy of the artist’s hand. At the same time, they reaffirm the centrality of the soup can as an image that Warhol would return to across his career, adapting and recontextualizing it as both his art and the culture it mirrored evolved.

Today, this drawing stands not only as a testament to Warhol’s enduring iconography, but also as a snapshot of his 1980s milieu, when Hollywood, New York, and the art world merged into a single glittering stage. Both playful and profound, casual and canonical, Hollywood Soup Can distills the essence of Warhol’s project: the transformation of the everyday into art, and the elevation of art into the fabric of celebrity culture itself.