Andy Warhol Soup Cans Analysis

Warhol’s choice of mechanical repetition of this explicit scene continues to dull the alarming content of the image. Silkscreening the newspaper clipping onto the canvas gives it a mechanical tone. Warhol’s choice to silkscreen and repeat may have been to highlight the concept of tragedy that is encountered everyday by people, making it nothing more than just another tragic scene seen in the newspaper. This deprives the disastrous and morbid scene of it’s significance, desensitizing the audience’s reaction in comparison to their initial response. His choice to only print the image twice rather than several times as he had done in Campbell’s Soup Cans could be due to the gruesome content being printed. Maybe Warhol concluded that since the content of Saturday Disaster is more dark compared to that of soup cans, he chose to limit the amount of repetition to protect the viewer of having to see such a painful scene over-and-over again. As a pop-artist, another concept Warhol may have been trying to express through this piece via the repetition and silkscreen is the idea that in this day-in-age, the widely cultural use of machines and technology may be impinging on human’s natural emotion. Through the camera, to the printed newspaper, silkscreened, and repeated, the image isn’t presented to the audience …show more content…
He uses repetition, balance, color, and silkscreen to numb an image, and in return, ignite an interesting thought in those who look beyond the canvas. He magnifies the use of machines and their impact on society, inherently devaluing objects as minute as a soup can to disastrous car accidents to human identity. Paul Bergin, the author of the article The artist as a Machine brilliantly puts it, “Warhol sees without reflecting and reproduces without understanding. We are left with an image-nothing more.” It is up to the viewer to accept Warhol’s invitation to consider the consequences of mass media and machinery in our daily