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38 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 38 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
The dealer set them in a single row on narrow ledges, like groceries on a shelf; MoMA recreated that shelf-like line in its 2015 Warhol show.
Q 07How much did Warhol charge the dealer for the complete set of 32 paintings in 1962?
$1,000
The dealer paid Warhol $1,000 for the whole set, in monthly instalments of $100, after reclaiming the canvases that had been sold.
Q 08Which actor bought a soup can painting in 1962, then was persuaded to return it?
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper was among the handful of buyers; he and his wife Brooke Hayward later hosted a party introducing Warhol to Hollywood during his second show at the gallery in 1963.
Q 09Roughly how many of the 32 paintings sold during the 1962 show before Blum reassembled the set?
Five or six
Five or six canvases sold, at $100 apiece, before the dealer persuaded the purchasers to give them back so the set could stay intact.
Q 10What happened on 4 August 1962, the day the soup can exhibition closed?
Marilyn Monroe died
Marilyn Monroe died that night; within weeks Warhol began his silkscreened Marilyn portraits, moving from supermarket shelves to celebrity.
Q 11Contrary 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 12What detail on each can did Warhol apply with a rubber stamp?
The gold fleur-de-lis
The gold fleur-de-lis emblems ringing the base of each can were applied with a hand-carved rubber stamp; the rest was painted in synthetic polymer paint.
Q 13Whose photographs of soup cans did Warhol trace to make the original 32 paintings?
Q 21How is Warhol's largest single soup can canvas, from 1962, arranged?
200 cans in ten rows and twenty columns
200 Campbell's Soup Cans, painted in 1962, sets 200 cans in ten rows and twenty columns on a 72-by-100-inch canvas, the largest of Warhol's soup can paintings.
Q 22What did Warhol change for his set of twenty large soup can canvases in 1965?
He replaced the red-and-white with bold, varied colours
For the 1965 series Warhol replaced the red-and-white with bold, varied colours, printing the label in combinations such as green on pink, using silkscreen rather than the hand-painting of 1962.
Q 23How many screen prints are in each of the Campbell's Soup I (1968) and Campbell's Soup II (1969) portfolios?
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 14Who reputedly advised Warhol, for a $50 fee, to paint 'something you see every day', like a soup can?
Muriel Latow
Muriel Latow, a gallery owner, gave the idea in late 1961 for $50, Ted Carey recalled; Robert Indiana said simply that Warhol liked soup.
Q 15How long did Warhol claim he ate the same Campbell's soup lunch every day?
Twenty years
Warhol told an interviewer he had eaten the same lunch every day 'for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again'.
Q 16What did a Campbell's marketing manager send Warhol in 1964 with a letter praising his work?
Cases of tomato soup
William MacFarland, Campbell's product marketing manager, wrote to Warhol in May 1964 that he had learned the artist liked the soup and was sending a couple of cases of tomato soup.
Q 17What inspired the red-and-white Campbell's label of 1898 that Warhol later immortalised?
The Cornell football team's uniforms
Herberton Williams, a Campbell's executive, admired the Cornell football team's red-and-white uniforms at a game in 1898; the label adopted the colours that year and added a Paris Exposition gold medal in 1900.
Q 18What year did Joseph A. Campbell and icebox maker Abraham Anderson found Campbell's?
1869
Joseph A. Campbell, a fruit merchant, and Abraham Anderson, an icebox maker, founded the firm in Camden, New Jersey, in 1869; Anderson left the partnership in 1876.
Q 19Warhol's 1962 painting 100 Cans belongs to a museum in which city?
Buffalo
100 Cans, a 1962 canvas of Campbell's cans in a square grid, belongs to the Albright-Knox collection in Buffalo, New York, renamed the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2023.
Q 20What 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.
Ten
Each portfolio holds ten screen prints, issued in an edition of 250; the 1969 set shows later varieties with more elaborate labels.
Q 24What disclaimer appeared on some unauthorised Brussels reprints of the screen prints?
'This is not by me'
Warhol signed a few of the Sunday B. Morning prints 'This is not by me' after a dispute over the 1970 Brussels editions, which were made from his screens and colour codes.
Q 25Which flavour was on the torn-label can painting that set a $60,000 record for a living American artist in 1970?
Vegetable Beef
Big Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Vegetable Beef) fetched $60,000 at Parke-Bernet in May 1970; Roy Lichtenstein's Big Painting No. 6 took the record at $75,000 that November.
Q 26Which collector paid $11,776,000 for Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) in 2006?
Eli Broad
Eli Broad bought Small Torn Campbell Soup Can (Pepper Pot) at Christie's New York in May 2006; it entered the collection of The Broad museum, which opened in 2015.
Q 27Approximately how much did MoMA pay for the original 32 canvases in 1996?
$15 million
MoMA paid about $15 million, drawing on the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and other funds plus a partial gift from the dealer, whose 1962 purchase had cost a tiny fraction of that.
Q 28How 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.
Q 29What did the promotional 'Souper Dress' of 1967 cost customers?
$1 plus two soup can labels
The paper Souper Dress could be ordered for $1 plus two soup can labels in 1967; examples are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute.
Q 30In 2012 Campbell's sold Warhol-inspired tomato soup cans through which US retailer?
Target
Target sold about 1.2 million limited-edition cans at 75 cents each from September 2012, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the paintings.