POP ART

• The title of this art movement comes from the word popular – as in popular music, or pop music. Pop Art took its inspiration from popular culture – the culture of the populace, of the people.

• It began in the late 1950s and is especially associated with the1960s. Pop art reflected everyday life and common objects. Pop artists blurred the line between fine art and commercial art.

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• Andy Warhol• Campbell’s Soup Can

Is this fine art or just packaging?

Richard Hamilton, a British artist and critic, referred to Pop Art, as, "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" – he stressed Pop Art’s everyday, commonplace values.

• Many people loved this democratization of art. Art didn’t have to be elitist, they felt. Why not make it accessible and understandable to the masses, they argued.

• Others felt that Pop Art cheapened the traditional function of art, which was to uphold and represent culture’s most valuable ideals.

• What do you think?

• Pop Artists used common images from everyday culture as their sources including: advertisements, celebrities, comic strips, photographs, and consumer goods

Andy Warhol – Marilyn Monroe

• Roy Lichtenstein

• Lichtenstein– Mmaybe

• Pop Artists used bold, flat colors and hard edge compositions adopted from commercial designs like those found in: billboards, murals, magazines, and newspapers.

• Pop Artists reflected 60’s culture by using new materials in their artworks including: acrylic paints, plastics, photographs, fluorescent colours and metallic colours.

• They experimented with new technologies and methods: Mass production, Fabrication , Photography, Printing, and Serials.

Andy Warhol

Warhol started out as a graphic artist creating shoe ads.

• However, by the early 1960s he was considered the pope of Pop Artists. Part of his artistic practice was using new technologies and new ways of making art including: Photographic Silk-Screening

• Repetition• Mass production• Collaboration• Media events

• Warhol’s studio in the 1960s in New York was known as The Factory – where, with a team of assistants, Warhol was putting out a tremendous body of work.

The Factory was a meeting place and a magnet for artists, actors, writers, poets, musicians and bohemians of every stripe.

Warhol regularly invited people he met to drop in there and do screen tests.

• His open door policy ended in 1968 when Warhol was shot by an irate woman whose script had not received the attention she had hoped for from Warhol.

• He came close to dying, but recovered from the gunshot.

Warhol appropriated (used without permission) images from magazines, newspapers, and press photos of the most popular people of his time including Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy.

• Andy Warhol• Jackie Kennedy

Andy Warhol – silkscreen print of Jackie Kennedy

Andy Warhol – silkscreen print of the actress Elizabeth Taylor

• Andy Warhol• Elvis Presley• Warhol created 20

versions of this image, including a triple Elvis that sold for $37 million dollars.

Brigitte Bardot – French actress

• Andy Warhol• Silkscreen print of the

actress Ingrid Bergman

Warhol took common everyday items and gave them importance as “art.” He raised questions about the nature of art. For example: What makes one work of art better than another?

Brillo Pads

• This is a wooden sculpture, one of a series of “grocery store” subjects.

Warhol the film maker

• Between 1963 and 1968, Andy Warhol made more than 60 films, plus some 500 short black-and-white "screen test" portraits of Factory visitors. One of his most famous films, Sleep, monitors poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. The film Eat consists of a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.

Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg began to create what he called combines, in the late 1950s. He would assemble unlikely combinations of objects as three dimensional sculptures.

As the Pop Art movement developed in the 1960s, he turned from three dimensional “combines” to silkscreened collages, using magazine and newspaper photographs and then painting into and over them.

These collages allowed him to make visual statements about contemporary issues.

• Robert Rauschenberg

• Robert Rauschenberg• Signs

Roy Lichtenstein

• Drowning Girl

Roy Lichtenstein

In the Car – Roy Lichtenstein