The word Pop Art is an
abbreviation for Popular Art. The
name says it all. The Pop Art
movement wanted to bring art
back into the daily life of people. It
was a reaction against abstract
painting, which pop artists
considered as too sophisticated and
elite. Pop artists' favorite images
were objects from everyday's life
like soup cans for Andy Warhol or
comics for Roy Lichtenstein.
Typical for the attitude of the Pop Art movement
was Andy Warhol's use of serigraphy, a photorealistic, mass-production technique of
printmaking. Pop Art intruded into the media and
advertising. The differences between The fine
arts and commercial arts were voluntarily torn
down. An excellent example are the designs of
music album covers in the sixties. The undoubted
cult figure of Pop Art was Andy Warhol (19281987). Other great names are Jaspar Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Claes
Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Georg Segal,
Wayne or James Rosenquist. The Pop Art
movement was mainly an American and British
art movement..
Pop art, like pop music, aimed to
employ images of popular as
opposed to elitist culture in art,
emphasizing the banal or kitschy
elements of any given culture. Pop
art at times targeted a broad
audience, and often claimed to do
so. However, much pop art is
considered very academic, as the
unconventional organizational
practices used often make it difficult
to comprehend.
Pop art:
an art style developed in the
1960s that drew visual
inspiration from popular visuals
such as tabloids, cartoons, ads,
packaging, and billboards. Pop
artists enlarged their images to
comment on the importance of
media in American life. Andy
Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and
Roy Lichtenstein were three of
the most famous Pop artists.
Andy Warhol (August 6,
1928 – February 22, 1987),
was an American artist,
avant-garde filmmaker,
writer and social figure.
Warhol also worked as a
publisher, music producer
and actor. With his
background and experience
in commercial art, Warhol
was one of the founders of
the Pop Art movement in the
United States in the 1950s.
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 Campbell's
Soup, poppy flowers, and the banana appearing
on the cover of the rock music album The Velvet
Underground and Nico (1967), and also for his
stylized portraits of twentieth century celebrity
icons, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley,
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Judy Garland, and
Elizabeth Taylor.
Outside the art world, Warhol is best known for
the quotation "In the future everybody will be
world-famous for 15 minutes". He later told
reporters, "My new line is, 'In fifteen minutes,
everybody will be famous'".
"Roy Lichtenstein was the
master of the stereotype, and
the most sophisticated of the
major Pop artists in terms of
his analysis of visual
convention and his ironic
exploitation of past styles.
The work for which he is
now known was the product
of a long apprenticeship.
(1923-1997)
Absurd and kitsch, this massive over-sized
version of a twentieth –century icon evokes a
sense of incredulity. The artist’s desire to
imitate and displace one of the most potent
symbols of American culture enhances its
power and impact. Not only in its
Claes Oldenburg (1929
unconventional subject matter but also in its - )
soft form it crushes all preconceived notions Giant Hamburger 1962,
of traditional sculpture being solid and hard. Printed sailcloth stuffed with
foam, h52 x w82 7/8 in,Art
Oldenburg was an American Pop artist
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
concerned with making art from materials
and precuts from the commercial
environment
He wanted his art to reflect
contemporary, everyday life in all
its complexity and change. This
work clearly takes it’s cue from the
American ‘fast-food’ empire that
was developing, at a meteoric
speed, in the 1960’s. In 1964
Oldenburg established a shop in
Green Street, New York, from
which he sold painted plaster
replicas of food and other
commodities.
In the following decade of the
sixties, Marisol found herself in the
sympathetic company of Pop artists
Roy Lichtenstein and Andy
Warhol, despite the fact that she
rarely used strictly commercial
items in her works. Marisol
participated in two of Warhol’s
movies – The Kiss and 13 Most
Beautiful Girls. Exploiting the
banality of popular culture was not
the sole focus of Marisol’s work:
wry social observation and satire
have always been integral to her
sculptures.
As the only female artist within the Pop
enclave, she managed to infuse a great
deal of individuality in her sculptures –
usually through the means of inserting or
adopting different identities. One of her
most well known works of this period
was The Party, a life-size group
installation of figures at the Sidney Janis
Gallery. All the figures, gathered together
in various guises of the social elite,
sported Marisol’s face. It is intriguing to
note that Marisol dropped her family
surname of Escobar in order to divest
herself of a patrilineal identity and to
"stand out from the crowd."
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Objectives: Students will
* Create portrait with contour line - drawing from observation &
plexi- glass
* Contrast warm and cool colors - work with pattern and textures
* Develop skills in using elements and principles of design