History of Pop Art Started: Mid 1950s -­‐ Ended: Early 1970s Welcome to our new year of Meet the Master’s and our Country Isles Museum! We wanted to start the year off with a lot of fun and so we chose the History of Pop Art or Art that was created to mimic or represent the Pop Culture of the time. I know you know what “Pop Music” is – new hip artists like Taylor Swift and Pit Bull and older stars like Michael Jackson and even Elvis Presley. Pop Art came about in the late 1950’s and early 1960s and it became an international phenomenon – because it was so chic and different than anything before it. Basically -­‐ Pop Art was inspired from commercial items and cultural icons such as product labels, advertisements, and movie stars and most of all – it was meant to be FUN! This style of art became even more popular in the 1960s. It started in the United Kingdom, but became a true art movement in New York City and throughout the United States. Pop Art introduced familiar imagery (images from mass media and popular culture) which was a major shift from traditional "high art" themes of morality, mythology, and classic history. Pop Art uses images and icons that are popular in the modern world. This included famous celebrities, rock stars and even commercial items like soup cans and soft drinks, comic books, and any other items that were popular in the commercial or TV world. 1 There are a number of ways that artists use these items to create art such as repeating the item over and over again, changing the color or texture of the item, and putting different items together to make a picture. By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars like Marilynn Monroe and Elvis Presley …the Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between "high" art and "low" culture. The concept that art may “borrow” its ideas or inspiration from any source has been one of the most influential characteristics of Pop art. Pop artists believed everything is inter-­‐connected, and therefore sought to make those connections literal in their artwork. Here are some examples of how these artists represented their ideas of Pop Art Culture: •
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Keith Haring -­‐ This New York artist is famous for his cartoon like outlined pictures of people doing different things and his graffiti-­‐inspired drawings. As a child, Haring was fascinated by the cartoon art of Walt Disney and Charles Schultz who illustrated the Peanuts gang and the illustrations of Dr. Seuss. He spent many hours drawing with his father, an engineer whose hobby was cartooning. He moved to New York City in 1978 and began using the city as his canvas, making chalk drawings in subway stations. His art was eventually seen everywhere from public murals and nightclubs to galleries and museums around the world. Haring soon began to apply his imagery to freestanding drawings and paintings. The energy and optimism of his art, with its bold lines and bright colors, brought him popularity with a wide audience. Like many of the Pop Artists – he wanted to make his art more accessible to the masses and not just rich art collectors so he opened a retail store called the Pop Shop in New York City's SoHo neighborhood and sold posters, T-­‐shirts and other affordable items featuring his signature designs. Over the brief span of his career, the artist completed more than 50 public works, including an anti-­‐
drug mural in a Harlem playground. He also hosted numerous art workshops for children. David Hockney -­‐ Drew his inspiration from the poems and writings of Walt Whitman who was a famous American poet, essayist and journalist. One such work, the 1961 etching “Myself and My Heroes”, depicted Hockney along with Whitman and Gandhi of India. Quotations from Whitman are prevalent throughout Hockney's work and he felt that by using the words of Whitman – he could best express the abstract and ambiguity in art and Whitman had done in print. Hockney also drew ideas from fairy tales as well. Some of his more renowned work comes from his etchings of tales by the Brothers Grimm who were famous German authors. They were considered among the best-­‐known storytellers of folk tales, and popularized stories such as "Cinderella", "The Frog Prince", "Hansel and Gretel" "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin", "Sleeping Beauty" and "Snow White. 2 •
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Jasper Johns -­‐ He began drawing as a young child, and from the age of five knew he wanted to be an artist. He is most famous for his paintings of the American flag. He has also painted a map of the United States and another famous painting of just numbers called Numbers in Color. It’s said that Johns' American Flag work is an autobiographical reference, because he was named after a brave military hero who raised the flag during the Revolutionary War. Some also say that because a flag is a flat object, it may signify a “flatness” or the lack of depth in much of modernist art Throughout his career, Johns has included in most of his art certain marks and shapes from factual, unimagined things in the world, including handprints and footprints, casts of parts of the body, or stamps made from objects found in his studio, such as the rim of a tin can. Roy Lichtenstein -­‐ is known for making art from the inspiration of comic books. In the 1950s, he often took his artistic subjects from mythology and from American history and folklore, and he painted those subjects in styles that paid homage to earlier art, from the 18th century through modernism. Lichtenstein began experimenting with different subjects and methods in the early 1960s while he was a College Professor. Like the others -­‐ his newer work was both a commentary on American popular culture and a reaction to the recent success of Abstract Expressionist painting by artists like Jackson Pollock (Remember the paint splatters)??. Instead of painting abstract, often subject-­‐less canvases as Pollock and others had done, Lichtenstein took his imagery directly from comic books and advertising. Rather than emphasize his painting process and his own inner, emotional life in his art, he copied sources like the impersonal-­‐looking stencil process that imitated the mechanical printing used for commercial art. (Like Magazines etc) In the 1980s and '90s, he also painted representations of modern house interiors, brushstrokes and mirror reflections, all in his trademark, cartoon-­‐like style. He also began working in sculpture. •
Wayne Thiebaud’s (TeBow) interest in art was also inspired by cartoons and comic strips such as George Herrman’s Krazy Kat. As a Teenager, he established himself as a cartoonist, working for a brief time as an animator for the Walt Disney studios and drawing a regular comic strip during a World War II while he was in the Air Force. He also worked as a poster designer before deciding to become a painter. In 1956, Thiebaud moved to New York, where he was in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He fashioned his own approach to art, adapting the thick pigments to his own subjects and style. His best-­‐known works, colloquial paintings were depictions of everyday items in American life—
sandwiches, gumball machines, jukeboxes, toys, cafeteria-­‐type foods, and bakery goods. They reflected a turn toward representational painting. These still life subjects of pies, cakes, lipstick, and toys were set against light backgrounds, often white, with the objects rendered in thick textures and playful colors of lush shiny oil paints – often called “Kool Aid Colors” One of his most famous paintings is of three gumball machines called 3 Machines. 3 And now to our finale -­‐ Andy Warhol -­‐ is probably the most recognizable of our Pop Artists. He used pictures of very famous people. He would repeat the same portrait over and over, but use different colors and effects in each picture. Some of the celebrities he had as subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara (Cuba) Mao Zedong (China), and Elizabeth Taylor. Although many (if not most) of the previous artists we have studied focused entirely on their art with no interest in personal fame or fortune, Mr. Warhol wanted very much to be a BIG celebrity himself. He opened a New York studio called "The Factory". He not only worked on his art there, but threw huge parties with wealthy and famous people. It became one of the cool places to be in New York. Andy was also selling a lot of his art. Surprising to some is that many of the images he created have become iconic in American culture. His paintings have grown in value as well. One of his portraits called Eight Elvises sold for $100 million in 2008. Despite having made a lot of money off of his art, Andy can also be credited with bringing art to the masses. He would mass produce prints of his art so it was affordable to everyone. Although Pop art encompasses a wide variety of work with very different attitudes and postures, much of it is somewhat emotionally removed. Where artists of the past were often seen as very emotionally intense Pop art is generally "coolly" ambivalent. Critics have long argued – does this suggest an acceptance of the popular world or a shocked withdrawal from it??? Conclusion Pop artists embraced the post-­‐WWII manufacturing and media boom. It was influenced by Abstract expressionism and the DADAism of the 20’s. The majority of Pop artists began their careers in commercial art such as magazine illustrators, graphic designers and even billboard painters. Their background in the commercial art world trained them in the visual vocabulary of mass culture as well as the techniques to merge the realms of high art and popular culture. Basically – Pop art was launched by the optimism of the 1950’s but from 1963 onwards, Pop-­‐art spread throughout America and, was helped by British Pop-­‐artists and quickly established itself on the Continent. The movement's rise was aided by similar growth in other areas. In economics, -­‐ it was the growth of the world economy in general and the American economy in particular; in science, via the spread of television; in music, (which itself became known as "Pop Music") with the miniaturization of radio, rapid record production, the appearance of cult like groups like The Beatles and lastly through an expanding art market. We hope you enjoy making your own Pop Art Masterpieces today. Now, close your eyes and let your imagination go and let’s begin our Superhero Success! 4