POP ARTMid 1950s-Mid 1970s

emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in the United States

Post-War Consumer Culture Grab Hold

(and Never Lets Go)

The years following World War II saw enormous growth in the American economy, which, combined with innovations in technology and the media, spawned a consumer culture with more leisure time and expendable income than ever before.

The manufacturing industry that had expanded during the war now began to mass-produce everything from hairspray and washing machines to shiny new convertibles, which advertisers claimed all would bring ultimate joy to their owners.

Significantly, the development of television, as well as changes in print advertising, placed new emphasis on graphic images and recognizable brand logos—something that we now take for granted in our visually saturated world.  1950s Advertisement for

theAmerican Gas Association

Key Concepts • By creating paintings or sculptures of mass

culture objects and media stars, the Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between "high" art and "low" culture.

• The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source. Such as: magazines, comics, newspapers etc.

• Pop artists believed everything is inter-connected, and therefore sought to make those connections literal in their artwork

• Incorporated found objects and images of contemporary culture into their compositions, blurring the distinction between the fine art object and the stuff of everyday life.

• Characterized by clearly rendered images of popular subject matter, it seemed to assault the standards of modern painting, which had embraced abstraction as a reflection of universal truths and individual expression

Claes Oldenburg, Study for cigarette butt, 1966

Pop ArtAt first glance, Pop Art might seem to glorify popular culture by elevating soup cans, comic strips and hamburgers to the status of fine art on the walls of museums.

A second look may suggest a critique of the mass marketing practices and consumer culture that emerged in the United States after World War II.

Whereas many artists have strived to portray the beautiful, Pop Art intentionally depicts the mundane.

Whereas many artists represent the noble, stirring, or monstrous, Pop Art renders the commonplace, the boring.

Work is mean to be impersonal- the very opposite of the highly personal Abstract Expressionism.

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Britain Pop Art begins in Britain

Britain focused on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American pop culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while simultaneously improving the prosperity of a society.

Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture when viewed from afar

British pop art movement predated the American pop art movement

Eduardo Paolozzi. I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947)

Richard Hamilton Just what is it that

makes today's homes so different,

so appealing? (1956)The finished collage presents all the multiple ways of communicating information available at that time, reflecting Hamilton’s ironic interest in popular culture and modern technology.

It shows a domestic interior complete with armchairs, coffee tables, pot plants and lamps. Such domestic appliances as a hoover, a television showing a woman talking on the phone on its screen, and a tape recorder that would have been considered state of the art in the 1950s .

A framed comic strip on the wall, sandwiched between a traditional nineteenth century portrait and a window onto a movie theatre, also belongs to a passed era.

Prophetically in the center of the work, a crowned FORD motorcar logo alludes to cars. The body builder holds a giant lollipop bearing the word ‘POP’ at the level of his groin, pointing towards the semi-naked woman sitting in a ridiculously artificial pose on the sofa opposite.

Pop Art in the US

American artists, bombarded every day with the diversity of mass-produced imagery, produced work that was generally more bold and aggressive

Robert Rauschenberg

1925-2008Best known for introducing a construction known as combine painting, in which stuffed animals,, bottles, articles of clothing and furniture and scraps of photographs are attached to the canvas.

The Bed (1955)

Paint-splashed quilt and pillow, mounted upright on a wall as any painting might be.

Toys with the traditional relationship between materials, forms, and content. Rather than a canvas on a stretcher, the quilt and pillow are the materials on which the painter drips and splashes his pigments.

Could Bed be considered a self-portrait of the artist? Why or why not?

How is it different than a traditional self-portrait?

Jasper Johnsb. 1930

Johns has bronzed two Ballantine beer cans and painted facsimile labels thereon.

Questions concerning the definition of art are raised: Is it art because the artists chooses the object? Because he or she manipulates it? Or because the artist says its art?

Johns erased the division between fine art and mass culture.

Andy Warhol1928-1987

Andy Warhol was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art.

His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s

Here, the image of a single Coca-Cola bottle is repeated in regular rows, seven high by sixteen across, above the company’s logo. The repetitive imagery and standardized format evokes the look of mechanical reproduction

In his deadpan and ironic way, Warhol at once criticized and glorified the consumerist idols and surface values of America’s media-saturated postwar culture. “A Coke is a Coke,” he explained, “and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”

Gold Marilyn Monroe1962

Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) clearly reflects this inherent irony of Pop.

The central image on a gold background evokes a religious tradition of painted icons, transforming the Hollywood starlet into a Byzantine Madonna that reflects our obsession with celebrity.

Like religious fanatics, the actress’s fans worshipped their idol; yet, Warhol’s sloppy silk-screening calls attention to the artifice of Marilyn’s glamorous façade and places her alongside other mass-marketed commodities like a can of soup or a box of Brillo pads.

Andy WarholCampbell's Soup

Cans1962Warhol's iconic series of Campbell's Soup Cans

paintings were never meant to be celebrated for their form or compositional style, like that of the abstractionists

What made these works significant was Warhol's co-opting of universally recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell's soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine art context.

In that sense, Warhol wasn't just emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with one glance.

100 canvases of Campbell's soup cans made up his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and put Warhol on the art world map almost immediately, forever changing the face and content of modern

Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31, 1950.1950.Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1962.

Let’s compare these works by Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock.

Double Elvis1963

He produced several life-sized portraits of Elvis Presley, America’s most famous rock and roll singer and sex symbol throughout the 1950s. By 1963, when this painting was made, Elvis—whose hip-shaking moves had scandalized some only a decade before—was being overshadowed by a new generation of performers, and his career was on the decline.

In Double Elvis, Warhol created a strobe effect by overlapping two images of the singer—most likely sourced from a publicity still for the Western film Flaming Star (1960).

The silver background conveys a sense of glamour,

 Double Elvis originally belonged to a long, continuous canvas of Elvises that was later cut and stretched into multiple paintings.

The artist’s interest in film might explain why he created Elvis in double—the singer/actor appears to be moving back and forth, as if in a film strip.

Roy LichtensteinDrowning Girl

1963Utilizing the conventions of comic book art, a thought bubble conveys the thoughts of the figure, while Ben-Day dots echo the effect of the mechanized printing process

The narrative element highlights the clichéd melodrama, while its graphics reiterate Lichtenstein's theme of painterly work imitating mechanized reproduction.

"high art," while the "low-art" subject matter included comic strip images.

Roy Lichtenstein. Drowning Girl. 1963

• How does the painting differ from the original?

• How does the meaning change?

DC Comics. Cover illustration for the comic story “Run for Love!”, from Secret Love #83 , 1962.

How do artists like Lichtenstein transform their pop culture sources?

Let’s take a look at Standard Station by Ed Ruscha

Edward Ruscha. Standard Station. 1966He began experimenting with the subject in his first artist's book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), which reproduces a series of banal photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 between Los Angeles and his hometown of Oklahoma City. That year, converting an otherwise ordinary locale into a dramatic, even mysterious symbol of the American vernacular landscape, Ruscha created a monumental painting titled Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, based on one of the photographs but with a radically foreshortened composition.

Tom WesselmaanStill Life #24

1962A picture of casual middle-class contemporary abundance, portrayed through the traditional language of the still-life.

Traditional still lifes celebrated the bounty of nature, but Wesselmann’s version depicts the bounty of modern consumerism.

•What is going on in this picture?

•Which objects are ‘real’, collaged or painted?

•How do these juxtapositions create visual tension and balance?

Still Life #30. 1963

James Rosenquist. Marilyn Monroe, I.

1962.

Captivated by the death of screen icon and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe like so many other Pop artists, James Rosenquist created a stylized, fragmented and inverted portrait of Monroe.

Hyper-real, upside down body parts are covered with Marilyn’s name and the popular soda brand: Coca-Cola.

“Painting is probably more exciting than advertising – so why shouldn’t it be done with that power and gusto, that impact …When I use a combination of fragments of things, the fragments or objects or real things are caustic to one another, and the title is also caustic to the fragments…” (ARTnews, 1964)

By fragmenting Monroe’s image and combining her with two very popular ‘products’—Marilyn and Coca-Cola, Rosenquist comments on how the late actress’ life and career had been co-opted and consumed by her superstar status.

Edward RuschaActual Size

1962

Ruscha explores the humorous potential of such massiveness, where a billboard-sized SPAM graphic is juxtaposed with a spam packet carefully painted in its actual size.

Claes OldenburgTwo

Cheeseburgers with Everything

1962Transforms common food items into stacked, gloppy masses. Though at first they look unappetizing, the artist appears to have created these burgers by taking

“Fast food” became a more common dining option, as more Americans patronized drive-in restaurants where the food was prepared before you ordered it.

These works attempt to convince the public to take a deeper look at just what they were buying.

Cildo Meireles Insertions into

Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project 1970

explore the notion of circulation and exchange of goods, wealth and information as manifestations of the dominant ideology.

For the Coca-Cola Project Meireles removed Coca-Cola bottles from normal circulation and modified them by adding critical political statements, or instructions for turning the bottle into a Molotov cocktail, before returning them to the circuit of exchange.

On the bottles, such messages as ‘Yankees Go Home’ are followed by the work’s title and the artist’s statement of purpose: ‘

To register information and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circulation’.

The Coca-Cola bottle is an everyday object of mass circulation; in 1970 in Brazil it was a symbol of US imperialism and it has become, globally, a symbol of capitalist consumerism.

As the bottle progressively empties of dark brown liquid, the statement printed in white letters on a transparent label adhering to its side becomes increasingly invisible, only to reappear when the bottle is refilled for recirculation

Jeff KoonsBalloon Dog1994-2000mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating

$58.4 million at auction in 2013, making him the most expensive living artist at the time.

 The piece has an interior life while the reflective exterior surface affirms the viewer through their reflection.

Paul Fuentes

Graphic designer, based in Mexico City, who enjoys staging everyday objects into surreal and colorful compositions creating pop mashups

Greg GuilleminSecret Lives of Super Heroes

Sara Zeher

Let’s compare these celebrity portraits from the 1960s to today

Richard Avedon. John Lennon. 1967

Sheppard Fairey. Barack Obama "Hope" poster. 2008

Sara Zeher. Daddy Issues. 2016