MODERN ART 1950s
Rauchenberg
Robert Rauchenberg
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Called the father of pop because he started using mass-media images in the 1950s
Felt those images were important bits of the world that could be used to narrow the gap between
art and life
Made “combine” paintings in which the parts coexisted equally and simultaneously – incorporated
objuects into the structure of the canvas
Started off as Abstract Expressionist and never fully left it
Combines had origins in Schwitters and other Dadaists, but his motivation was to create unity out of
impermanent materials, topical events and expressive brushstrokes
In the 50s, it contained art reproductions, magazine and newspaper clippings, and segments painted
in in an Abstract Expressionist style
In early 60s, he started silk screening and filled canvases with news images and anonymous photos
of city scenes
Estate
o Typical of his photoscreen paintings
o Familiar things like traffis signs, staue of liberty, the Sistine Chapel showing the Last
Judgement by Michaelangelo are mixed with painted shapes and “annymous” pictures of
city buildings, human legs, a clock face and a palette of colour patches containing the tonal
values and the colours red, yellow and blue
o Some of the images tilt, each overlays or is invaded by its neighbor,
o Resembles a Dada collage, but the parts of a combine painting retain their individuality
o Represent the experience of day to day life in modern cities
o The eye travels the canvas as though you were walking down a city street
Red Grooms
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Born in Nashville, Tennessee
known for whimsical sculptural tableaux and paintings, especially with circus themes.
Caricature on an environmental scale – satirical work - Brilliant and clashing colours
He works with all kinds of materials including paper, plaster, wood, found objects, and cardboard.
About his work, he says he has "a giddy sense of reality."
City of Chicago (1967), a room-sized, walk-through "sculpto-pictorama," features sky-scraperproportioned sculptures of Mayor Daley and Hugh Hefner "joined by such historical figures as
Abraham Lincoln, Al Capone, and fan-dancer Sally Rand, accompanied by a sound track featuring
gunfire and burlesque music.
In 1956, Grooms relocated to New York City to continue his studies at the New School for Social
Research. New York has since been his permanent home, as well as a source of inspiration for many
of his works.
Later that decade, Grooms began experimenting with performance, gaining notoriety for his
“Happenings:” unstructured live art events that were equal parts vaudeville, Keystone Kop caper
and circus act.
By the 1960s, Grooms was creating the lively, mixed-media self-named “sculpto-pictoramas,” and
installations for which he became known. Populated with colorful characters of every ethnicity, age
and walk of life, Grooms’ cityscapes capture the vibrant and often chaotic energy of modern
metropolitan life.
His major installations, The City of Chicago (1967), and Ruckus Manhattan (1975/76) captured the
imaginations of thousands of viewers. After Ruckus Manhattan , a turning point in his career,
Grooms dedicated himself to New York Stories, a series of prints and sculptural tableaux that were
an homage to the city.
Although deeply rooted in American culture, Grooms' work conveys a sense of humor and an
appreciation of human nature that is universally understood.
Jim Dine
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By 1962 Dine was creating paintings that appeared more like drawings on canvas and incorporated
real, everyday things, such as hammers and other tools. This work is part of a series that features
tools familiar from Dine's youth working in his father's hardware store.
Dine's work shares some similarities with Pop art, including the appropriation of everyday objects,
such as the hammer here, into art. However, the artist has disavowed allegiance with the Pop
movement saying, "I'm not a Pop artist… I'm too subjective."
Started making junk accumulations about the same time and started incorporating real articles of
clothing into his paintings in 1959
Moved on to fixing deliberately selected hardware to his canvases
The gestural paint surfaces and the objects interact like distinct voices
In other work, the expressive colour or surface helped define the objects themselves
In others, he depicted the common objects as subject matter
When he used objects he saw “them as a vocabulary of feelings” – his work was very
autobiographical
his many images of neckties and bathrobes are surrogate self-portraits
tools represent Dine’s childhood memories of the hardware store owned by his family in
Cincinnati. The hearts represent his wife.
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Gentleman Caller
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Seven White Hammers - Etching, aquatint and drypoint with hand coloring in acrylic and charcoal
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Five Paintbrushes
Claes Oldenberg
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Associated with Pop movement because works contain objects from everyday life
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Plays with scale and texture to invest ordinary objects with some mystery, but also playfully
rendered as iconic
In the 50s, used found materials, plaster and commercial paint to make sculptures and drawings of
the objects he saw in the streets and storefronts
Briefly involved in Happenings
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Oldenburg’s embrace of the commodities of materialist culture as subject-matter placed
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him in the forefront of what became known as Pop Art
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by reversing their characteristics of hard and soft, rigid or yielding, Oldenburg created an art of
parody and humour
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Found that increased scale transformed his inanimate objects into “characters” – anthropomorphic
Heightened further with objects created out of sewn and stuffed cloth – these re-made objects, like
appliances and food, became personalities
His “monument” proposals were single objects enlarged to huge scale and installed at specific sites
where they would spark laughter and a certain uneasiness on the part of the viewer
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commitment to a democratic art available to all
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Floor Cake
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Clothespin
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Jasper Johns
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One of the first conceptual artists
Interested in the complex processes involved in perceiving simple symbols
Began including generic symbols, like the American flag and targets, in his work
Common things, often seen, but seldom with careful attention
Rendered with texture of a hand-applied art medium, encaustic
His target has no reference beyond the design and the fact that it represents a target – it remains
the replica of a target, but it has also become an art object with no clear significance because it
cannot be used as a target and remain a painting
In Target with 4 faces, he’s added four boxes with a single hinged lid each containing the cast of the
lower half of a human face. These casts are not portraits – they seem to be the same face, but
subtle differences are seen (they were cast at 4 distinct but successive moments)
The faces represent only themselves, like the target. They are seen or not seen depending on the
lid being open or closed
He has picked a part of the face that is seen but generally not examined, usually it’s the eyes that
capture out attention in the human face
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These appropriated things acquire a presence that makes us wrestle with the relationship between
the thing and the representation
POP ART
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The aftermath of WWII brought an increase in the production and availability of consumer goods,
esp. in the US with a similar rise in billboard, magazine and newspaper advertising to entice the
public to buy brand names “guaranteed” to provide the “good life”
In England, Europe and the US, artists were soon using the images and style of American advertising
as symbols of the materialistic side of modern life
The term Pop Art was invented to describe the interest in the symbols of popular culture – the term
was soon applied to art that looked like advertising, industrial design, Hollywood movies and
illustrations in pulp literature
In America, artists used pop images to give art the immediacy of life
Its success was in part due to the familiarity of the images to the public
Iconography of commerce and culture as widely known in the modern world and earlier religious
symbols tied to religion and government had been in pre-modern society – Gothic Cathedral portals
and French Revolutionary art
Oath of the Horatii
Richard Hamilton
Made a small collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
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Symbolized many of the attitudes of British Pop Art
Was interested in how advertising shapes our attitudes
Consistently combined elements of popular culture and fine art, seeing both as belonging to
the whole world of visual communication
Just What Is It
o Created for the poster and catalog of an exhibition “this Is Tomorrow” - an installation filled
with images from Hollywood cinema, science fiction, the mass media
o The fantasy interior in his collage reflects the values of modern consumer culture through
figures and objects cut from glossy magazines by Hamilton’s wife and a couple of friends
who followed a list of themes he gave them
o Reconstructs found images into a new whole – transformed an abstract expressionist
painting into a rug, and turning a comic book cover and an automobile logo into paintings
on the wall
o Infers a mass-mind, and critiques society’s values
David Hockney
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Tried to close the gap between art and life by using his own life and the lives of his friends and
lovers
Inspired by Picasso, Matisse and Bacon
Came from England to LA – the pool is a central image in his art
A Bigger Splash
o Combines his flat pattern design and mood so very like Matisse with Bacon’s painterly
virtuosity of the splash itself
o He was amused over the short period of time the water was in the air compared to the
length of time it took to paint the effect
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sense of suspended animation and high noon brightness is a result of the artist working
from photographs
his approach in all media has been so distinctive and original, he belongs to no art movement
also worked with photo collage – esp. the concept of space
began scanning his subjects with Polaroids , assembling the series of prints he made of different
partsof a scene into one picture
the final collages are records of several points in time as well as space – they reflect the path of eye
movement scanning the entire site
Merced River, Yosemite Valley 1982
o He emphasizes the process of making the work at the same time that he makes us
conscious of the motion that is part of our natural process of observing the world around us
Andy Warhol
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Most well-known pop artist
Found his subjects in mass media, but mostly commercial design, mass advertising and news photos
of ordinary people rather than in images of fine art, famous events or anonymous buildings
Began using screen printing to create paintings of subjects like Campbell’s soup can labels, sheets of
stamps, wanted criminals and famous people
His background in commercial art may have influenced him in his use of harsh colours and simplified
shapes
Marilyn Diptych
o Initial work in his celebrity series was inspired by the suicide of Marilyn Monroe in 1962
o It contains 50 reproductions of a well-known publicity photo
o 25 in colour, 25 in b&w
o On the colour side, Warhol simplified the areas of hair and face into stark colour patches
that suggest both a mask and the high key look of a publicity poster
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The b&w side have been screened unevenly, with one row almost covered by smeared apint
and another so faintly printed as to create a ghostlike effect
Warhol was fascinated with the idea of fame, esp its fragility
Predicted that the age of mass media would enable everyone to be famous for 15 minutes
Fame vs. celebrity
Roy Lichtenstein
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In 1961 Lichtenstein began his first Pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from
the appearance of commercial printing.
included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking.
His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Benday Dots was Look Mickey
(1961, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
- Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays
them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too seriously however: "I think my work is different
from comic strips- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is
important to art".
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Rosenquist
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Was a billboard painter for a while working over Times Square
Having such a close-up vision of commercial art translated into huge paintings of fragmented reality
put together under the control of Cubism
Wanted to organize the total picture surface
F-111
o Is 10 feet high and 86 feet long, capable of being organized into a complete room to
surround the spectator
o Named after an American fighter-bomber
o Made up of a series of images of destruction combined with details of happy, everyday
American life in the 60s
o An indictment of warfare
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Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Warhol share an attachment to the everyday and commonplace as
well as their treatment of the subject matter – in an impersonal, neutral manner
They don’t comment on the scene or attack it, and they don’t exalt it like ad men. They simply say
that this is the world we live in, this is the urban landscape, these are the symbols, the interiors that
make up our lives
Pop artists deal mostly with the new, the “store bought” and the idealized vulgarity of advertising
and television commercials