Andy Warhol's lost artwork found on 1980s floppy disks

Andy Warhol&#039;s lost artwork found on 1980s floppy disks

(Image credit: 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)

last updated 8 January 2015

"Yeah, Andy Warhol's soup cans are neat," someone must have once said somewhere, "but they'd look even cooler in MS Paint."

Well, fictional friend, you're in luck. The Andy Warhol Museum has unearthed floppy disks from 1985 that contain the pop artist's experiments with primitive graphic design software. Technically, the images were made on an Amiga personal computer, but the results are more or less what you'd get from your basic Windows machine of yesteryear, too.

The museum said it had the floppy disks in storage for years, but only dug them up when a "Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd" came calling after seeing a YouTube video of Warhol test-doodling on a computer. Taking care not to damage the decades-old contents, a team then extracted the files — a real file name: "campbells.pic" — and found that they included riffs on Warhol's iconic subjects, including, of course, soup cans.

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Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.

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