Andy Warhol’s Top 10 Paintings: The Stories Behind His Most Famous Works

After about two years in Tate’s conservation studio, Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych is back on view at Tate Modern. The conservators removed six decades of dust and dirt. Monroe’s face now looks closer to the way it did in 1962, the year he painted it.

How did a former commercial illustrator from Pittsburgh make pictures that museums still treat this carefully? Most of the answer lies in 10 paintings, seven of them made between 1962 and 1964. They appear below in chronological order.

Andy Warhol’s Top 10 Paintings at a Glance

The list in brief, from the first soup cans to his final exhibition in Milan:

• Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962): Its 32 canvases made a grocery item the subject of serious art.
• Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962): A grid of 112 bottles that mixes hand stamping with mass-produced looks.
• Marilyn Diptych (1962): Fame and death side by side, painted in the weeks after Monroe died.
• Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963): The strongest of his news pictures of violent death.
• Triple Elvis (1963): A film star repeated across silver paint, made for a Los Angeles gallery.
• Flowers (1964): His brightest series, which also led to a copyright dispute.
• Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964): The most expensive American painting ever sold at auction.
• Mao (1972): A political portrait painted on the scale of a propaganda poster.
• Self-Portrait (1986): The spiky wig and pale face of his last series of self-portraits.
• The Last Supper (1986): A late commission that was on view in Milan when he died.

10 Most Famous Paintings by Andy Warhol

Only paintings are on this list. The Brillo Boxes, the films and the Cow wallpaper stay out, however famous they are. Each of these 10 works changed something in Warhol’s career. Two also broke price records.

From the Marilyn Diptych on, most share one method. Warhol picked an existing image, usually a photograph taken by someone else, had a silkscreen made from it and printed it straight onto a painted canvas, often more than once.

1. Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)

In July 1962 the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles hung 32 paintings of soup cans, one for each variety Campbell’s sold at the time. The dealer Irving Blum lined them up on narrow shelves, like products in a supermarket.

Critics mocked the exhibition. A dealer down the street put real cans in his window with a sign offering “two for 33 cents.” Blum did not laugh. He bought the whole set from Warhol for $1,000, paid over 10 months, and kept the canvases together. In 1996 the Museum of Modern Art acquired them through a gift and sale valued at more than $15 million.

2. Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962)

At first sight this picture looks like a factory product. Seven rows of 16 bottles line up above the Coca-Cola logo, painted in the year Warhol developed his silkscreen technique. Look closer and no two bottles match. According to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the dark contours were most likely applied by hand with a carved wooden block.

Why Coke? Warhol gave his answer in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975): “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.”

The painting is part of the Whitney’s collection in New York.

3. Marilyn Diptych (1962)

Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962. That same month Warhol started making screenprints of her face, using Gene Kornman’s publicity shot for the film Niagara (1953), cropped close around her features. The left panel is all color and glamour. On the right her face turns black and white, with some of the images almost gone. Fame and death would stay in his work for years.

The two panels started as separate works. The collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine bought them, and it was Emily who suggested showing them as a pair. Warhol’s answer, as she later recalled it: “gee whiz yes.” In 2004 Gordon’s, the gin brand that sponsored the Turner Prize, polled 500 artists, critics, curators and dealers on modern art. They put the Marilyn Diptych in third place for influence, behind only Duchamp’s urinal and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

4. Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963)

Not everything Warhol painted in those years was glamorous. In 1962, while he worked on the Marilyns, he also began the series known as Death and Disaster, based on newspaper photographs of accidents. At the center of Silver Car Crash is a body caught in a wrecked car.

The painting measures about 8 by 13 feet. When it came to Sotheby’s in 2013 after more than 20 years in a private collection, it sold for $105.4 million, then a record for the artist.

5. Triple Elvis (1963)

For his second solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, in 1963, Warhol picked Elvis Presley as a gunslinger. The image comes from a publicity still for the western Flaming Star. He printed it over silver paint, the color of the movie screen, and repeated the figure across the canvas.

He did not even send stretched canvases. According to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Elvises reached Los Angeles as a single roll of painted canvas that nobody had cut yet, along with stretchers already built to size. The gallery director, Irving Blum, had to prepare the paintings himself. One version of Triple Elvis now belongs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

6. Flowers (1964)

After two years of film stars and car crashes, Warhol painted flowers. His source was a photograph of hibiscus blossoms by Patricia Caulfield, which Modern Photography had published in June 1964. The first paintings went on view at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York that year.

Caulfield was not pleased. She took legal action, turned down the few prints Warhol offered her and later settled, according to The Andy Warhol Museum. None of this slowed him down. From that one image he went on to make hundreds of Flowers paintings and a portfolio of 10 screenprints.

7. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964)

In 1964 Warhol went back to Monroe’s face in a group of square canvases, 40 inches on each side. Not long after, Dorothy Podber, a performance artist from the East Village, fired a single shot through a stack of them at the Factory. Four of the paintings now carry the word “Shot” in their titles.

In 2022, 58 years later, Christie’s offered Shot Sage Blue Marilyn. After less than four minutes of bidding, the price reached $195 million with fees, The Irish Times reported. No American work has sold for more at auction. The money went to a Zurich foundation that funds children’s health and education programs.

8. Mao (1972)

An American pop artist painting the Chinese leader during the Cold War sounds like provocation. The idea came from the news. Warhol read the coverage of Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 and chose Mao Zedong as his next subject. His source was the official portrait printed at the front of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, then among the most reproduced images in the world.

Warhol used that one image for paintings, drawings, prints and even wallpaper. One of the biggest canvases, nearly 15 feet tall, belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Warhol once joked about the subject: “Everybody’s always asking me if I’m a Communist because I’ve done Mao.”

9. Self-Portrait (1986)

Warhol painted himself many times. The last series came in 1986, when the London dealer Anthony d’Offay commissioned large self-portraits for his gallery. Warhol prepared with Polaroids of himself in a spiky “fright wig,” his face pale against a dark ground.

The man in these pictures is 57 and looks older, his face handled like one of his celebrity portraits. He finished no other self-portraits before his death, according to the National Galleries of Scotland, which holds one of the Polaroids.

10. The Last Supper (1986)

Warhol ended his career with Leonardo da Vinci. The Greek dealer Alexander Iolas proposed a set of works based on the Last Supper. Warhol worked from printed reproductions of the fresco. The pictures went on view in Milan in early 1987, in the former refectory of the Palazzo delle Stelline, across the street from the church that holds Leonardo’s original.

The Milan exhibition was still open when Warhol died in New York on February 22, 1987, after surgery to remove his gallbladder.

Avery Andon, chief executive of ArtLife Gallery, would pick the soup cans if he could keep only one: “People laugh at them the first time, and then they can’t stop thinking about them. Those 32 paintings of soup, hung like groceries, changed what a painting could be about. Everything else on this list comes after that summer in Los Angeles.”

Where to See Andy Warhol’s Paintings Today

You do not need a private invitation to see most of them. The Soup Cans are at MoMA in New York, the Marilyn Diptych at Tate Modern in London and Green Coca-Cola Bottles at the Whitney. The Art Institute of Chicago holds one of the biggest Mao canvases, while a Triple Elvis belongs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

For the widest view of his career, visit The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the city where he was born. It is the largest single-artist museum in North America, with about 900 paintings, more than 1,000 prints and thousands of photographs.

Owning Warhol’s Most Famous Images as Prints

The paintings almost never come up for sale. Warhol did, however, reuse many of the same subjects in signed screenprints. ArtLife offers works from several of these series, including Campbell’s Tomato Soup, a Flower, a Mao and one of the Marilyn Monroe sheets of 1967.

Nico Hayes, senior director at ArtLife, likes how well the Flowers work outside a museum: “The paintings are in museums, but the images aren’t. I’ve seen Flowers prints in kitchens and hallways, places where nobody would hang a museum piece. They still look new 60 years on.”

Other favorite subjects are easier to find as prints than as paintings. The Cow began as wallpaper in the mid-1960s, while the Dollar Sign and the Camouflage prints belong to his last decade. All of them are on the Andy Warhol artworks page available for online purchase.

Prices, editions and returns for these prints are covered in our Andy Warhol Investment guide, and the studio where many of them were made is the subject of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Andy Warhol’s most famous painting?

Two paintings usually top the list, Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych, both from 1962. The soup cans made consumer goods a subject for fine art, while the Marilyn Diptych came third in a 2004 poll on influential modern art. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is the costliest.

How many Campbell’s Soup Cans did Warhol paint?

The famous 1962 set has 32 canvases, one for each variety the company sold at the time. MoMA owns the complete group. Warhol returned to soup cans many times in later paintings and prints, including the Campbell’s Soup I and II screenprint portfolios of the late 1960s.

Where can I see the Marilyn Diptych?

Visit Tate Modern in London, which owns the painting. Tate’s conservators recently completed a two-year cleaning that brought back colors hidden under decades of dirt. The work hangs in the collection displays when it is not on loan, so check the museum’s website before you go.

What was Andy Warhol’s last major series?

The Last Supper was his last major series. Alexander Iolas commissioned works based on Leonardo’s fresco. Warhol exhibited a selection in Milan in early 1987. He died in New York the following month, while the exhibition was still open across from Leonardo’s original.

Why did Warhol paint everyday objects?

Warhol believed ordinary products were part of a shared American culture. Everyone drank the same Coke and ate the same soup, whatever their income. By painting them in repeated, mechanical rows, he made the look of advertising and mass production the subject of fine art.