Pop Art Movement by Maine College of Art

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POP ART

explained through the prolific quotes of andy warhol

Andy Warhol, Banana, Screenprint on styrene, 1966

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All quotes by Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol, Dollar Sign, 1962, (Previous page)

“art is anthing you can get away with.”

Popular Culture Andy Warhol, Various, 1964

“a pop artist is someone who produces things people don’t need to have.”

Andy Warhol, 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

“ONCE YOU THINK POP, YOU CAN NEVER SEE AMERICA THE SAME WAY AGAIN.”

op art was a brazen , youthful and

exhibits from Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo soap pads, Heinz ketchup boxes, Mott’s apple juice and Coca-Cola bottles—screen printed or as still lifes. At first, Pop Art was not accepted by the public. Famous artists like Roy Lichtenstein were questioned as “the worst artist in the U.S.” according to an article from Life Magazine in the 1950s. Once the movement caught, on people were spending exorbitant amounts of money on Pop Art works. This was ironic because the technique and execution was just as mundane as the subjects themselves and added to the notion of overspending, materialistic Americans. Andy Warhol said, “I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting, I think you should take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall. Then, when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.” In a sarcastically profound way this explained how Americans aimed to impress and show off the things they have; mass media and money was the focus. The emergence of the Pop Art movement not only impressed the wealthy; it changed the culture. This movement was so iconic and profound that the art is still produced and researched in today’s day and age.

simplistic movement that started around the 1950s in the United States. It was a development of the coinciding globalization of Pop Music and youth culture. It was also a reaction against and a development of Abstract Expressionist painting. Many people and artists felt Abstract Expression ism had become too elitist and introspective. Pop Art evolved as an attempt to reverse this trend. Pop artists did this by reintroducing images as a structural device in painting, to pull away from the obscurity of abstraction in the real world. The Pop Art forerunners included Roy Lichtenstein, Claus Oldenburg, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney and Andy Warhol, the artist who personified Pop Art more than anyone. Pop Art focused on themes of popular culture in art, emphasizing trite objects and banal elements of any culture. These subjects included mass media, mass production, consumerism, advertisement, comic books, celebrities, foodstuffs and mundane objects. They were usually employed through the use of satire and irony. The high prices of Pop art was ironic in itself because of the mass-production technique and unoriginal subject matter. Andy Warhol created an entire

MASS PRODUCTION “I WANT TO BE A MACHINE, I THINK EVERYONE SHOULD BE A MACHINE.”

Andy Warhol, Electric Chair (Suite), 1971

Pop Art upraised the truism of these routine products through certain characteristics and styles. Andy Warhol used commercial techniques such as collaging and screen printing, the mass production method of printing multiple colors and images in a fast and efficient way. His work was not beautifully rendered, it was more about duplication and repetition, but it was still considered high art. Andy Warhol’s concept was always the same, “I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they’re all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better or worse painting.” The rawness and seeming disregard for painterly precision was common. Pop artists combined, reproduced, overlaid, arranged and duplicated

he fascinating aspect of pop art was

the extreme distance between the mass production quality of the artwork and the unwarranted prices they were being sold. But there in lies the idea of Pop Art, the concept that Andy Warhol cared so much about the blur between high art and low culture; the willingness of his audience to spend fine art prices on low culture art. Many Pop Art artists used second-hand images of celebrities, political figures, or consumer products which they believed had an intrinsic banality that made them more interesting. They felt that the objects had been stripped of their meaning and emotional presence through their mass-exposure.

endless visual elements. They enjoyed satirizing objects by enlarging them to massive proportions. Food was a common theme in the Pop Art movement, as well as household objects such as tables and toilets made of soft plastic instead of whatever materials they’re usually made of. ‘Soft Toilets’ was sculpture of a large toilet created by Claus Oldenburg, a strong sculptor during the movement. Repetition was a customary style of Andy Warhol. He felt that repetition was a way to build emotional tension. Repeated objects made his audience question and feel differently about the object that when singular held a dissimilar meaning. Andy Warhol spoke about his Death

and Disaster series, “Once you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.” His art referenced disasters seen in the newspaper everyday in repetition as to the disaster’s emphasis. Pop Art characteristics were flat, colorful, graphic, mundane, low-cost, youthful, and witty. The paintings did not show evidence of the application of fine art techniques and they did not have symbolism beyond what the purpose of the object represented. Vivid colors were used the most, to refer to the popular culture. Roy Lichtenstein developed a style based on the comic strip and created tones with Ben-day dots, the technique used in the 50s to print tones in comic books.

“you’d be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. specially if the background color matches the drapes.”

“you know it’s art once the check clears.” Andy Warhol, 192 One Dollar Bills, 1962

he deadpan images of pop art had

much more to say than they appeared. They were not just the flat and mundanely rendered objects that they looked like at first glance. Pop Art represented the values of American society. The value of the artwork was the value that the artist, or the dealer placed on it. Andy Warhol’s piece, “192 One Dollar Bills,” questioned the real value of money. By placing the one dollar bills in this regular gridded pattern, he reduced the money to a wallpaper design, a literal take on “hanging money on the wall.” Since most people value money not for itself but for what it may buy, Warhol dissected the motivations behind it, and whether people should idolize it or spend it. What Pop Art all came down to—popular culture, consumerism—was the cleared checks. n

â&#x20AC;&#x153;whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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 coke, liz taylor drinks coke, and just think, you can drink coke, too.â&#x20AC;? 12

” Sources:

Brauer, David E. Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956-1966. Houston, TX: Menil Collection in Association with Hatje Cantz, 2001. Print. Copplestone, Trewin. The Life and Works of Andy Warhol. Bristol: Paragon Book Service, 1995. Print.

Honnef, Klaus, and Benedickt Taschen. Andy Warhol, 1928-1987: Commerce into Art. Print.

Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. New York: Praeger, 1966.

Wilson, Simon. Pop. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s, 1978.

Designed and written by Kristina Curtis

Composed in Athelas and Comic Book, typefaces designed by Veronika Burian and Dieter Steffmann Printed by Toshiba e-STUDIO3055c on Hammermill 80# Digital Copy Cover