1. Pop Art
• "Everything is beautiful. Pop is
everything."
Andy Warhol (1928?1930?-1987)
• "I am for an art that takes its forms from
the lines of life itself, that twists and
extends and accumulates and spits and
drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt
and sweet and stupid as life itself."
Claes Oldenburg (1929-),
POP ART
"Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything."Andy Warhol (1928?1930?-1987), American Pop artist.
"I am for an art that takes its forms from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."Claes Oldenburg (1929-),
Andy Warhol
“Pop” from popular
Blurring ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture
Rejection of ‘non objective’ art
Inspiration from Marcel Duchamp
The 1950s were a period of optimism in Britain following the end of war-time rationing, and a consumer boom took place. Influenced by the art seen in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition Parallel between Art and Life at the Institute for Contemporary Arts
Eduardo Paolozzi, I was a rich man’s plaything, 1947
Meet the People 1948
It's a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps your Disposition 1948
from Ten Collages from Bunk
Screenprint, lithograph and collage on papersupport: 372 x 241 mmon paper, unique
These collages are mainly made from magazines given to Paolozzi by American ex-servicemen. They show his fascination with popular culture and technology, as well as with the glamour of American consumerism. The title of the series refers to Henry Ford''s famous statement that ''History is more or less bunk.... We want to live in the present''. It reflects Paolozzi''s belief that his work should respond to contemporary culture.
During the 1950s Paolozzi became involved in the Independent Group, a loose association of young members of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. They met to discuss ideas and enthusiasms then ignored by the art pundits, above all science, technology, and popular culture, especially American movies and science fiction. In 1952, at the group's first meeting, Paolozzi projected a large number of his collages on to a screen. For most of his audience the juxtaposition of the weighty and trivial, the artistic and technological, were a revelation. The collages suggested a radically new aesthetic that, before the end of the decade, was to form the basis of pop art.
Abbreviation of Popular Art, the Pop Art movement used common everyday objects to portray elements of popular culture, primarily images in advertising and television. The term Pop art was first used by English critic, Lawrence Alloway in 1958 in an edition of Architectural Digest. He was describing all post-war work centered on consumerism and materialism, and that rejected the psychological allusions of Abstract Expressionism. An attempt to bring art back into American daily life, it rejected abstract painting because of its sophisticated and elite nature. Pop Art shattered the divide between the commercial arts and the fine arts.
The Pop Art movement originated in England in the 1950s and traveled overseas to the United States during the 1960s. Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, both members of the Independent Group, pioneered the movement in London in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the movement was carried by Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Peter Phillips. In the early sixties, Pop art found its way to the United States, seen in the work of Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. It developed in the United States as a response to the wealth of the post World War II era and the growing materialism and consumerism in society. The most recognized Pop Artist, Andy Warhol, used a photo-realistic, mass production printmaking technique called seriagraphy to produce his commentaries on media, fame, and advertising.
Richard Hamilton
Born into a working class family, Richard Hamilton grew up in the Pimlico area of London. Having left school with no formal qualifications Hamilton got work as an apprentice working at an electrical components firm. Here he discovered an ability for draughtsmanship and began to do painting at evening classes
Hamilton curated the first and to date only British retrospective of Duchamp's work
On the emergence of pop he says
The idea was that there were certain things that were new in our visual environment, such as cinema, the jukebox, Marilyn Monroe and comics. All these images from popular culture contrasted with the way we saw things that could be informed by straight - forward optical experience
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (Possibly also the work of John McHale)
The pop art collage shows an interior of John McHale's London living room atelier with "Zabo" a bodybuilder from Venice, California. Zabo is holding an outsized American lollipop with the word 'Pop' on its wrapper which was intended by McHale as a deliberate design reference to the fact McHale had coined the term Pop art in 1954. The bodybuilder is paired by an almost nude female figure who is posed on a sofa. Other elements are a tin of ham placed on a coffee table, a newspaper, a reel to reel tape recorder and a framed page from a romance American comic book strip predicting the work of Roy Lichtenstein
windows that look on to a view of a Warner Brothers cinema advertising The Jazz Singer.
Thoroughly steeped in commercial culture starting in the 50s when he worked for newspapers and then Harper’s Bazaar (check) as an ad illustrator. Then did album cover design for RCA??
Also won awards as ad artist and did store window.s
While a prize-winning commercial artist in the 1950s, he devised a printing process of blotting outline drawings in ink from one surface to another. In a whimsical book of fashionable shoe styles, done at the time he was head of advertising at a shoe company, his blotted drawings were reproduced and then hand-colored by a team of friends.
Rather than deriving his work from subjective personal feelings or idealist visions for abstraction, Warhol embraced popular culture and commercial processes. He eventually set up his own print-publishing company called Factory Additions, issuing portfolios of his signature themes
Found images re-used
Mass media, celebrity, etc.
“In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”
Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962. In the following four months, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.
Marilyn Monroe was a legend when she committed suicide in August of 1962, but in retrospect her life seems a gradual martyrdom to the media and to her public. After her death, Warhol based many works on the same photograph of her, a publicity still for the 1953 movie Niagara. He would paint the canvas with a single color—turquoise, green, blue, lemon yellow—then silkscreen Monroe's face on top, sometimes alone, sometimes doubled, sometimes multiplied in a grid. As the surround for a face, the golden field in Gold Marilyn Monroe (the only one of Warhol's Marilyns to use this color) recalls the religious icons of Christian art history—a resonance, however, that the work suffuses with a morbid allure.
In reduplicating this photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol denied the sense of the uniqueness of the artist's personality that had been implicit in the gestural painting of the 1950s. He also used a commercial technique— silkscreening—that gives the picture a crisp, artificial look; even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public image as a carefully structured illusion. Redolent of 1950s glamour, the face in Gold Marilyn Monroe is much like the star herself—high gloss, yet transient; bold, yet vulnerable; compelling, yet elusive. Surrounded by a void, it is like the fadeout at the end of a movie.
“What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it “
When Warhol first exhibited these thirty–two canvases in 1962, each one simultaneously hung from the wall like a painting and rested on a shelf like groceries in a store. The number of canvases corresponds to the varieties of soup then sold by the Campbell Soup Company. Warhol assigned a different flavor to each painting, referring to a product list supplied by Campbell's. There is no evidence that Warhol envisioned the canvases in a particular sequence. Here, they are arranged in rows that reflect the chronological order in which they were introduced, beginning with "Tomato" in the upper left, which debuted in 1897.
Repeating the same image at the same scale, the canvases stress the uniformity and ubiquity of the Campbell's can. At the same time, they subvert the idea of painting as a medium of invention and originality. Visual repetition of this kind had long been used by advertisers to drum product names into the public consciousness; here, though, it implies not energetic competition but a complacent abundance. Outside an art gallery, the Campbell's label, which had not changed in over fifty years, was not an attention-grabber but a banality. As Warhol said of Campbell's soup, "I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again."
From August 1962 Andy Warhol began to produce pictures using screen printing, attracted by the repetitive nature, speed and element of chance in this process. At the same time he developed a series of images of American icons such as Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor. This full-length image of the singer was taken from a publicity still for the 1960 film Flaming star. It was printed 28 times in black paint onto a roll of silver-painted canvas in various combinations — singly, superimposed doubly and triply, and in pairs. Here, Warhol is subverting the cult of celebrity, making a witty statement about camp and kitsch instead.
In 1964, the Bianchini Gallery in New York staged an exhibition called The American Supermarket. A number of artists, including Richard Artschwager and Andy Warhol, displayed and sold works which were made to resemble supermarket products. Warhol created a number of objects for sale, including the Brillo Boxes. His handmade replicas, though not strictly ?ready-made?, were meticulously copied from the actual commercial packaging, prompting the original designer to sue. Through his art, Warhol created icons from mundane objects, as Duchamp had done almost fifty years earlier with Fountain.
This is actual chair in which Julius & Ethel rosenberg were electrocuted
