American Pop Art Essay Example For Students

American Pop Art Essay Examine the mass medias influence on both the formal and iconographic features of American Pop Art. Centre your discussion on one or two examples each of the work of the following artists: Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist. Pop Art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from mass culture such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the ideas of abstract expressionism which preceded Pop in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The decade of the 1960s was perhaps one of the most provocative, in terms of culture, politics and philosophy, of the 20th century. The amazing growth that transpired in America from the end of World War II through the cold war period of the 1950s resulted in a newly formed consumer culture. In the first years of the decade, Pop artists responded to this new commercialism and embraced consumerism as a fitting subject of their art. Hallmarks of Abstract Expressionism such as expression and gesture were replaced with cool, detached, mechanical illustrations of common objects, often based on advertising images. Basing their techniques, style and imagery on certain aspects of mass reproduction, media-derived imagery and consumer society, Pop artists began to erode the gulf between high art and low art, taking inspiration from advertising, pulp magazines, billboards, movies, television, comic strips, and shop-window displays. For instance, mass produced supermarket food is often the subject matter of its art including hamburgers, French fries, sandwiches, soup cans, soda and beer cans, and cakes. Among Pop Arts famous examples are Tom Wesselman and his Great American Nude series, Andy Warhols canonization of the Campbells soup can, Roy Lichtensteins blowups of comic strips, James Rosenquist and his juxtaposed image stories and Claes Oldenburgs Store. These artists believed that art had become too inward and unrealistic. They wanted their art to reflect the contemporary world of the mid-twentieth century city; they wanted to reflect a rapidly changing society. Whats more, Pop Art investigates the areas of popular taste and kitsch that were previously considered outside the limits of fine art. Andy Warhol was an avant-garde American artist, filmmaker, writer and social figure. He was one of the founders of the Pop Art movement in the United States in the 1950s and who is claimed to have brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbells soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century. Andy Warhol had a lifelong interest in movie stars which first surfaced in his art in 1962 when he begun working on portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol attempted to keep his personal fascination with fame from showing through too clearly in his works, preferring to leave their meaning open to the interpretation of viewers. Warhol is best known for his extremely simple, larger-than-life, high contrast color paintings (silk-screen prints) of packaged consumer products, everyday objects, such as Campbells Soup, poppy flowers and the banana and also for his stylized portraits of the twentieth century celebrity icons, such Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor. Warhols early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements. However, cartoons and comics were already being used by fellow artist Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject of his own and his friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. In his signature way of taking things literally, he painted images such as his famous cans of Campbells soup, which he had for lunch most of his life. Yet, Warhols Campbells Soup Cans, (1962, The Museum of Modern Art) can also represent other notions. It can depict the cheapness of mass culture. It can also be viewed as a cynical joke about the American collectors artistic nationalism or it may merely illustrate Warhols genuine love for his mother who constantly fed him canned soup. Campbells Soup Cans as well as Warhols famous Marilyn Monroe, (1962, Leo Castelli Gallery) are silk screened paintings based on the mass produced. These images are often presented in a series by which Warhol repeats the picture a large number of times on the same canvas or on separate canvases. Each image in the series is slightly different from the next one. Warhol utilizes a wide range of color from the monochrome to the vivid and vibrant. In his Campbell Soup painting, numerous rows and columns of red and white Campbell soup cans are painted alongside each other. They are all identical except for the flavor of the soup that is written on each can. Warhols main aesthetic strategies were based on the fashion industry and mass media advertising. This means that he constantly used reproduction and incessant repetition in the art work. But it was repetition and reproduction without a message. For example, the statement Black Bean on the Campbells soup can is meaningless when it is reproduced in art, which is exactly how mass advertising works and Warhol wanted his artwork to have this same effect. However, Warhols Campbells soup did not only function as an illustration of commercial industry and advertisement, it was an intrinsic part of Warhols life and memories and popular culture. For him the soup represented a feeling of being at home with family. It was what the mass media declared a comfort food. Tamed Shrews And Twelfth Nights: The Role Of Women EssayJames Rosenquist himself explained that face was from Kennedys campaign poster. I was very interested at that time in people who advertised themselves. Rosenquist admired the work of other New York artists like Oldenburg who were incorporating objects or images of everyday life into their artwork. They wanted to bridge the gap between art and life while eschewing emotion as a primary source of inspiration. Oldenburgs approach differs from that of pop artists Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein. His idiosyncratic method to his subjects stems in part from his affinities to the earlier movements of dada surrealism. In 1961 Claes Oldenburg opened The Store. This large-scale environment contained colorful plaster sculptures of shirts, ties, dresses, and food, all of which were sold as merchandise from a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Store was an exploration of common everyday objects and reconfiguring food items, such as a hamburger and an ice-cream cone, and mechanical devices like telephones and typewriters. The store was a handmade, colorful, consumer-oriented, friendly temple to money and materialistic culture. In his store, Oldenburg introduced an innovation in sculpture. The soft sculptures, which were objects constructed in fabric that permits them to change form. For example, Floorburger is one of Oldenbergs soft sculptures made from canvas that is filled with foam and cardboard and painted to replicate a giant hamburger. Form, surface, color, and the evocation of the human figure are Oldenburgs primary formal concerns. To realize the ultimate shape of an object, Oldenburg reduces it to a combination of simple geometric forms. He also once remarked that colorful, engaging objects employ humor to relax people and allowed him to get serious messages across. Pie a la Mode, (1963, The Museum of Contemporary Art) is one very important object from The Store. Oldenburg fashioned the sculpture out of wire, muslin and plaster. He used layers of enamel paint to give the work color and its shiny texture. The object is oversized, drippy, gaudy, sensuous and vulgar. At first glace, this sculpture looks like a slice of blueberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream placed on the top. However, some critics have interpreted this work as a serious representation of the greedy consumer culture where too much is never enough. Other critics felt that Oldenburg created simple art for simple minds. Yet, Oldenburg claimed that he wanted to make art that was accessible to everyone on there own terms. He encouraged his audience to bring there own experiences to his work and to associate and discover whatever they could about the form and meaning of his work. Oldenburg spent much of his life bending, inflating, melting and enlarging the ordinary objects of 20th century American reality. Throughout his career Claes Oldenburg has demonstrated the power of the imagination to transform the everyday environment. Drawing inspiration from the ubiquitous and mundane, he has created artworks of varying scale and media that astonish with their wit, humor, and metaphoric associations. The fifth American Pop Artist is Tom Wesselmann. While his work wasnt as important as Warhols or Lichtensteins (or even Oldenburgs or Rosenquists), Wesselmann deserves credit for being one of the few artists of that era to tackle traditional art history themes such as the nude and the still life. Beginning in the 1950s, he made collages from magazine clippings and found objects, often incorporating female nudes. So Wesselmann went to paint his variations on the Great American Nude that incorporated pink, heavily nippled female forms with neat pubic triangles, who were posed bathing and lounging. Subsequently Wesselman became best known for this Great American Nudes series. This series portrayed Wesselmanss idealized version of the American male dream girl. His women were often extremely attractive with large breasts who struck suggestive poses. They looked like plastic cutouts of women and his painting Study For Helen, (1964, Gallery Schlesinger) is a classic example of his work. In this painting a beautiful fair skinned woman is lying in a provocative position against a colorful background. The color of his background is arbitrary and the composition of the pale naked woman against the bright uplifting random shades is flattering and electrifying. On the womans body a white strip is set against her pink flesh and a delicately airbrushed suggestion of public hair shocks by creating an erotic charge and indicating that the white strip is an area of skin that has been protected by the sun. Tom Wesselmans 100-piece Great American Nude series of the 1960s indicates the flip and brash promiscuity of his style. In general, this series employed flat billboard colors and faceless but curiously erotic naked women painted to represent the medias portrayal of classic American beauty. The work by these five American Pop Artists was undoubtedly characterized by their portrayal of any and all aspects of popular culture that had a powerful impact on contemporary life. Their iconography was taken from television, comic books, movies, magazines and all forms of advertising. The images were then presented emphatically and objectively. Everything by these artists was rowdy, daring, playful and brash. The 1960s was clearly a time of delicious freedom, humor, irony, and witty commentary on the materialism and banality of mid-twentieth century America. All the images painted during this period can be read as both an unabashed celebration and a scathing critique of popular culture.