Art Can Do
How the Campbell’s soup tin became a Pop icon to rival Marilyn and Elvis…
The humble can of Campbell’s soup was notable even before Andy Warhol made it ‘iconic’ in the 1960s. Over half-a-century earlier, it was one of the earliest examples of deliberate graphic language intended to attract and inform using ‘stealth’ psychology to improve its commercial performance over its competitors — what we now know as ‘packaging design’, a sort of ‘sub-set’ of advertising.
The origins of canned food can be traced back even further, to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe when a very attractive award of 12,000 French Francs was offered for a successful process of preserving food indefinitely. This was to enable the distribution of supplies to the frontlines and keep the soldiers fed. The prize was given to the brewer, Nicolas Appert, in 1809. He devised a way of cooking food in sealed jars which seemed to remain unspoiled until opened — a form of ‘pasteurisation’ decades ahead of Louis Pasteur discovering that microbes caused food to ‘go off’ and that cooking prevented this.
Another Frenchman, Philippe de Girard, was to patent a tin can process just one year later. The innovation of using a metal cannister instead of glass meant that shipping was far more viable for these shiny ‘unbreakable’ capsules. Initially, the biggest demand came from the…
