Harry´s Blog

I always loved Campbell’s Tomato Soup. When I was a child, my mother used to serve it to me mixed with milk and with a boiled potato in it. It was my favorite soup dish and I never got tired of eating it. Today I have sentimental attachment to it, although I now prefer Heinz Tomato Soup since it’s less sweet.

I liked the design of the can and the Campbell’s soup advertisements and I still do. However, in spite of my memory of Campbell’s, I doubt that the depiction of the can is a work of art. And the fact that the copy of the ad, like the can, came from a “factory” adds to my suspicion.

When the Campbell’s can was depicted naturalistically and declared to be a work of art, two things happened. The board of directors of the Heinz Food and Produce Company gnashed their teeth in unison and the doors of the art world were flung open to artists free of art.

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My late friend Dusko Tomovski, who had translated Faust I and II into Macedonian, told me the following story: At the age of fifteen he went up to the mountains to fight with the Tito partisans. At nightfall, he asked a grizzled comrade where he should sleep. The answer was:

“Find the softest stone.”

In 1992 when I was at the PEN Congress in Dubrovnik, which was still under siege, my friend Luko Paljetek the poet told me that a Serbian fighter up in the hills was reputed to have said:

“We will destroy Dubrovnik and build an older city.”

- Herbert Kuhner