Martin Irvine's Favorite Artwork

DC area gallerist Martin Irvine quickly established Irvine Contemporary as one of the leading Mid Atlantic art galleries and has led the way in bringing the super hot Chinese art to the DC region. He responds to my call for readers' favorite artworks and writes:

I was just in the NGA-East and was impressed by the nice little suite of works they have up from 1962, the turning point year in pop. I love Andy Warhol’s “200 Campbells Soup Cans” (1962): it’s entirely hand painted with some cut stencil work, and made before the now iconic soup cans from silk screens. Andy started silkscreening in 1963 after learning it from Gerard Malanga. The 200 hand painted soup can painting on canvas seems even more subversive because he made a painting that looks commercially made, a repetitive series of logos and product graphic design ubiquitous in every supermarket, but rendered back into a painting made by hand. The outrageousness of that — in 1962!

200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, (detail) 1962 (Acrylic on canvas, 72 inches x 100 inches), by Andy Warhol