50 free Campbell's Soup Cans trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Campbell's Soup Cans trivia for art students, museum-goers, pop-culture obsessives and anyone who has stood in front of the 32 canvases at MoMA wondering what the fuss was about. The quiz covers how Andy Warhol made them - hand-painted, not silkscreened, in a Lexington Avenue apartment with a rubber stamp for the fleur-de-lis - and the July 1962 debut at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, where they sat on ledges like groceries, a rival gallery mocked them with a pyramid of real cans, and Blum bought the lot back from Dennis Hopper and friends for $1,000 in ten instalments. It also covers Campbell's own reaction (lawyers, then a case of soup), the label's Cornell football origins, the many variations - torn labels, the 200-can grid, the coloured 1965 set, the 1968 and 1969 print portfolios, the 'Sunday B Morning' knock-offs - record auction prices, thefts, MoMA's 1996 purchase and the Souper Dress. Around a third of the questions are easy and the rest reward people who actually read the wall text. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which artist painted the Campbell's Soup Cans series?
Andy Warhol
He was a successful commercial illustrator looking for a subject that would set him apart from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist.
Q 02How many canvases make up the original Campbell's Soup Cans series?
32
Each shows a different variety of Campbell's soup on the same 20-by-16-inch canvas.
Q 03In which city were the Campbell's Soup Cans first exhibited, in July 1962?
Los Angeles
Warhol did not attend, there was no formal opening, and the show coincided with La Cienega Boulevard's Monday Art Walk.
Q 04What was the name of the West Coast space that gave the soup cans their first show?
Ferus
Its owner had visited Warhol's studio in May 1962, when he was working on his sixteenth soup can, and was amazed he had no dealer.
Q 05Which art dealer kept the original 32 canvases together as a set and eventually helped MoMA acquire them?
Irving Blum
He put them on permanent loan to the National Gallery of Art in 1987, two days before Warhol died, and MoMA bought them in 1996.
Q 06How were the paintings displayed at their 1962 debut?
In a single row on narrow ledges, like groceries on a shelf
MoMA repeated the shelf-like presentation in 2015, only the fourth time the series had ever been shown in a single line.
Q 07How much did Warhol charge the dealer for the complete set of 32 paintings in 1962?
$1,000
The dealer paid in ten monthly instalments of $100 after persuading the handful of buyers to give up their purchases.
Q 08Which actor reserved Campbell's Soup Can (Tomato) before the 1962 show opened, then was talked into giving it back?
Dennis Hopper
He and his wife Brooke Hayward later threw a party to introduce Warhol to Hollywood at his second show there in 1963.
Q 09Roughly how many of the 32 paintings sold during the 1962 show before Blum reassembled the set?
Five or six
They were reportedly offered at $200 and went for about $100 apiece; collector Don Factor 'never forgave' Blum for taking his Tomato back.
Q 10How did the nearby Primus Stuart Gallery mock the soup can show?
It stacked real cans in its window with a sign reading 'Get the Original'
The sign offered the real thing at 'Our Low Price 2 for 33 Cents'; the city's main newspaper ran a cartoon ridiculing the paintings too.
Q 11What happened on 4 August 1962, the day the soup can exhibition closed?
Marilyn Monroe died
Warhol began his silkscreen portraits of Monroe shortly afterwards, moving from supermarket shelves to celebrity.
Q 12Contrary to popular belief, how were the original 32 canvases made?
Traced and hand-painted, with stamped details
They were among the last works Warhol painted largely by hand; he only mastered silkscreen later, learning from Floriano Vecchi of Tiber Press.
Q 13What detail on each can did Warhol apply with a rubber stamp?
The gold fleur-de-lis
Q 21Which 1926 painting by Luigi Lucioni is thought to be the first depiction of a Campbell's soup can in high art?
Still Life with Telephone
It set the can and a telephone against homemade wine and an apple as symbols of industry versus tradition, decades before Warhol.
Q 22What object appears in the 1962 painting that was the first Warhol shown in a museum?
A can opener
Big Campbell's Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable) is the only work in the series to show one; it sold for $27.5 million in 2017.
Q 23How is Warhol's largest single soup can canvas, from 1962, arranged?
200 cans in ten rows and twenty columns
He also used commercial-grade acrylic rather than the oil paint usual for fine art.
Q 14Where did Warhol paint the series in late 1961 and 1962?
His home studio at 1342 Lexington Avenue, New York
The building was photographed in 2007 as the birthplace of the series; the Factory came later.
Q 15Whose photographs of soup cans did Warhol trace to make the original 32 paintings?
Edward Wallowitch, his former boyfriend
Warhol had already used Wallowitch's photographs as source material for his self-published A Gold Book in 1957.
Q 16Who reputedly advised Warhol, for a $50 fee, to paint 'something you see every day', like a soup can?
Muriel Latow
Other stories credit grocery shopping, his love of soup and Coke, or his mother's habit of making flowers out of tin cans; Robert Indiana said simply that he liked soup.
Q 17How long did Warhol claim he ate the same Campbell's soup lunch every day?
Twenty years
He said his mother opened a can for him 'because that's all we could afford', though biographers doubt the family ate it often, since it was marketed as upscale.
Q 18How did the Campbell company first react to the 1962 exhibition?
It sent lawyers, then mailed Warhol a case of tomato
By late 1962 it had changed tack and commissioned a tomato soup can painting as a gift for its retiring chairman.
Q 19What inspired the red-and-white Campbell's label of 1898 that Warhol later immortalised?
The Cornell football team's uniforms
The chemist John T. Dorrance had just devised a way to condense soup; the tilted 'O' in Soup and the 1900 gold medal survive on today's label.
Q 20What year did Joseph A. Campbell and icebox maker Abraham Anderson found Campbell's?
1869
Anderson's son Campbell Speelman stayed on as creative director and designed the original soup cans.
The 72-by-100-inch canvas was shown in the 1963 exhibition Six Painters and the Object in Minneapolis.
Q 24What did Warhol change for his set of twenty large soup can canvases in 1965?
He replaced the red-and-white with bold, varied colours
Nineteen of the twenty survive; twelve were reunited at L&M Arts in New York in 2011.
Q 25How many screen prints are in each of the Campbell's Soup I (1968) and Campbell's Soup II (1969) portfolios?
Ten
Each portfolio was issued in an edition of 250; the 1969 set shows the updated, more elaborate labels.
Q 26What disclaimer appeared on some unauthorised Brussels reprints of the screen prints?
'This is not by me'
The knock-offs, stamped 'Sunday B Morning', came out of a falling-out between Warhol and studio employees who took his screens and colour codes to Belgium.
Q 27Which flavour was on the torn-label can painting that set a $60,000 record for a living American artist in 1970?
Vegetable Beef
Roy Lichtenstein beat the record within months when Big Painting No. 6 fetched $75,000.
Q 28Which collector paid $11,776,000 for Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) in 2006?
Eli Broad
The painting now hangs in his own museum, The Broad.
Q 29Approximately how much did MoMA pay for the original 32 canvases in 1996?
$15 million
The purchase drew on a long list of funds and bequests plus a partial gift from the dealer who had bought them for a pittance in 1962.
Q 30How does MoMA normally arrange the 32 canvases on its wall?
In a grid ordered by the dates the flavours were introduced
At the National Gallery of Art they had hung in a four-row, eight-column grid in alphabetical order.