5.1 pop art
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Transcript of 5.1 pop art
American Pop Art
Art 109A: Art since 1945
Westchester Community College Fall 2012 Dr. Melissa Hall
Origins Pop art originated with the BriEsh Independent Group
Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956 Eduardo Paolozzi, I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, 1947 Tate Gallery
Rela,ves AffiniEes with French Nouveau Réalisme
Arman, Accumula;on, 1961
Raymond Hains, , Pour la Paix La Démocra;e le Progrés Social 1959
Precursors Neo-‐Dada
Junk Art Assemblage Happenings
Pop
Robert Indiana’s Love sculpture on 6th Ave NYC
“Pop is everything art hasn’t been for the last two decades . . . It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and oversaturation of abstract expressionism . . . Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola . . .The self-conscious brush stroke and the even more self conscious drip are not central to its generation. Impasto is visual indigestion.” Robert Indiana
Cultural Perspec,ves: Pop arEsts were responding to the rapid growth of consumer adverEsing
Consumerism
Vintage postcard for Garden State Plaza, New Jersey Image source: http://mallsofamerica.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html
“American economic success hinged on mass consumerism and a burgeoning military-industrial complex . . . . To make certain the nation was never again infected by economic depression, Americans were urged to go on a shopping spree: buying new cars, suburban homes, washing machines, refrigerators, and television sets. To ensure its global economic dominance, particularly against communism, the nation dramatically enlarged its defense industry, and US corporations and consumer products (Coca-Cola, Marlboros, TV) increasingly penetrated foreign markets.” Erika Doss, Twentieth Century American Art, Oxford History of Art, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 125.
Mass Media And to the advent of mass media technologies
While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television set in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962
1950s television set Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Television_set_from_the_early_1950s.jpg
Media Mass Media Mass media transforms free ciEzens into “consumers”
Typical American Family, 1950s Image source: http://www.noozhawk.com/green_hawk/article/050610_energy_toll_of_televisions_328500_watts_and_counting/
Mass Media Robert F. Kennedy: first “television” president
Media has the power to shape global poliEcs
Televised debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, 1960 Image source: http://jeremywaite.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/how-will-your-name-be-remembered/
MediaStudies Marshall McLuhan, “father” of Media Studies
Marshall Macluhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
Avant Garde and Kitsch While purified abstracEon disdained popular culture, Pop art embraced it wholeheartedly
“Clement Greenberg and most of the abstract expressionists had always maintained a rigidly elitist stance toward vernacular culture . . .” Tony Scherman http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2001/1/2001_1_68.shtml
Clement Greenberg looking at a painting by Ken Noland Image source: http://www.theslideprojector.com/art1/art1twoday/art1lecture9.html
Avant Garde and Kitsch The culture of “kitsch” that Clement Greenberg had derided in 1939 had reached a new level of pervasiveness and intensity
“By 1960 Greenberg’s kitsch—television, advertising, magazines, movies, and other mass media—had lodged itself deeply in America’s consciousness. Media-generated imagery was too urgent, too omnipresent, for artists to ignore. “ Tony Scherman http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2001/1/2001_1_68.shtml
A New Reality
“The Pop artists . . . . were responding to the new American visual landscape, a vista of advertising, billboards, commercial products, automobiles, strip malls, fast food, television, and comic strips. They therefore took print, film, and television images from media-based reality and transformed them into art, often through various mechanical means. Their pictures were often images of images, copies of copies, a twice-removed effect that echoed the techniques of mass production, the media and marketing.” Lisa Phillips, The American Century: Art & Culture 1950-2000, Whitney Museum/W.W. Norton, 1999, p. 114.
First Macdonalds, San Bernardino, California Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_McDonalds,_San_Bernardino,_California.jpg
Tom Wesselmann Tom Wesselman captures the media-‐saturated reality of postwar American society in a series of sEll lives from the 1960’s
Tom Wesselmann, S;ll Life #24, 1962, Nelson Atkins Museum Image source: h^p://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aen/Images/Ecology/24.php
S,ll Life SEll Life: an arrangement of “things”
Raphaelle Peale , Still Life with Cake, 1818 Metropolitan Museum
Daniel Spoerri, Kichka's Breakfast I, 1960 Museum of Modern Art
Tom Wesselmann, S;ll Life #24, 1962, Nelson Atkins Museum Image source: h^p://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aen/Images/Ecology/24.php
Tom Wesselmann Wesselmann’s sEll lives are not pictures of “things” but of media adverEsements for things
Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #35 (1963) at L&M Arts Image source: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/robinson/robinson4-17-06_detail.asp?picnum=19
Tom Wesselmann, S;ll Life #24, 1962, Nelson Atkins Museum Image source: h^p://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aen/Images/Ecology/24.php
Tom Wesselmann, S;ll Life #24, 1962, Nelson Atkins Museum Image source: h^p://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aen/Images/Ecology/24.php
Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #36, 1964 Whitney Museum
Tom Wesselmann Similar to Jasper Johns’ Flag – pictures of images rather than things
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-5, Museum of Modern Art
Mediated Reality Pop art took the “second hand” reality of media culture as its subject ma^er
Mediated Reality Mediated reality refers to a kind of pre-‐processed reality, delivered through controlled media outlets (radio; TV, adverEsing)
Inventor Hugo Gernsback with his T.V. Glasses. Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Imagesene 01, 1963
Mediated Reality Pictures of pictures, rather than things
Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places, and Things (Bloomsbury, 2005)
Mediated Reality, by Barry Carlton Image source: http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=5215460&size=lg
Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #28, 1963
Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #30, 1963 Museum of Modern Art
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #57, 1964 Whitney Museum
Titian , Venus of Urbino, 1538
Willem De Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52 Museum of Modern Art
Fe,shism The figures are typically faceless, with selecEve emphasis on feEshized body parts (lips; nipples)
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude, 1964
Fe,shism The flat hard edge shapes mimic the cool impersonal style of commercial adverEsing – and contemporary hard edge abstracEon
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #59, 1965 Hirshhorn Museum
Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Green Red, 1962-3 Metropolitan Museum
Walk-‐In Environments Wesselmann also did “walk-‐in” environments
Tom Wesselmann, Bathtub 3, 1963 Museum Ludwig
Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #48, 1963 Image source: http://www.life.com/image/80663562
George Segal Figures made from plaster casts of real people and placed in actual environments
George Segal, Bus, 1962 Hirshhorn Museum
George Segal, Diner, 1964 Walker Art Center
Edward Hopper, Night Hawks, 1942
Mark Rothko called them walk-in Edward Hopper paintings
Environments Segal’s sculptures allow the viewer to enter the work and engage with it as an experience
George Segal, Three people on four benches, 1979
George Segal Segal is oien associated with the Pop Art movement because his sejngs evoke American consumer culture
George Segal, Tar Roofer, 1964 With Robert Indiana’s Love paintings
George Segal, Cinema, 1963 Albright Knox Gallery
“In Segal’s work . . . the readymade settings . . . are more vivid, even more ‘alive’ than the plastercast figures which surround them. Here, the world of things seems to participate in the evacuation of selfhood. It is those things, Segal suggests, rather than human agency, which constitute a public world.” David Joselit, American Art Since 1945, Thames & Hudson, 2003, p. 75
Roy Lichtenstein Roy Lichtenstein began as an abstract painter
Roy Lichtenstein, Untitled, 1959
Roy Lichtenstein His involvement with Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenberg, and George Segal, inspired him to explore popular imagery
Roy Lichtenstein, Refrigerator, 1962
Roy Lichtenstein This painEng was based on an adverEsement for a vacaEon resort in the Poconos
Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with a Ball, 1961 Museum of Modern Art
Roy Lichtenstein He didn’t just incorporate the image into a collage the way the Independent Group did
Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956
Eduardo Paolozzi, I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, 1947 Tate Gallery
Roy Lichtenstein Instead, he faithfully duplicated the image
Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with a Ball, 1961 Museum of Modern Art
“The closer my work is to the original the more threatening and critical the content.” Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein He used a projector to copy his source images
Roy Lichtenstein He used Ben-‐Day dots to create haliones
Roy Lichtenstein, Magnifying Glass, 1963
Roy Lichtenstein His mechanical, impersonal approach was the complete opposite of “acEon painEng”
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with a Ball, 1961 Museum of Modern Art
“Lichtenstein . . . rebelled into impersonality . . . he put the copy into a projector and traced the magnified image onto a canvas for the outline of his painEng. His trademark Ben Day dots (the Eny dots used by printers and cartoonists for shading) made his canvases look printed, not painted. “I wanted to look programmed,” he told an interviewer. The hand, bearer of individuality, was feEshized by abstract expressionism. Pop slapped it away.” Tony Sherman, "When Pop Turned the Artworld Upside Down"
Roy Lichtenstein The banality of his subject ma^er was equally shocking
Roy Lichtenstein, Standing Rib, 1962 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Roy Lichtenstein, Refrigerator, 1962
Roy Lichtenstein It seemed to be the anEthesis of the heroic content of Abstract Expressionism
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimus, 1950-51 Museum of Modern Art
Lichtenstein’s use of popular imagery and impersonal strategies challenged accepted aestheEc values in several ways:
• Originality: by using “readymade” imagery, Lichtenstein challenged expectaEons about “originality” (the Etle of Michael Lobel’s book on Lichtenstein is “Image Duplicator”)
• Significant Subject MaMer: while the Abstract Expressionists sought “tragic themes” Lichtenstein’s subject ma^er comes from the vulgar realm of popular culture
• Individual style: instead of a personal style, Lichtenstein “paints like a machine”: he literally copied his images using a projector, and he used the commercial technique of Ben-‐day dots to create half-‐tones
The deadpan, impersonal style of Pop art, along with its unashamed embrace of popular culture and a figuraEve style, was in every way a rejecEon of the cherished principals of the Abstract Expressionist generaEon
Roy Lichtenstein Lichtenstein is best known for his painEngs of comic books
Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961 National Gallery of Art
Roy Lichtenstein Many of them were based on the popular DC comic book series
Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963 Museum of Modern Art
Roy Lichtenstein Lichtenstein claimed to be interested in the form rather than the content
Roy Lichtenstein, Hopeless, 1963 Kunstmuseum, Basel
“I paint my own pictures upside down or sideways. I often don't even remember what most of them are about. I obviously know in the beginning what I'm painting, and that it will be funny or ironic. But I try to suppress that while I'm doing them. The subjects aren't what hold my interest.” http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/kimmelman1.htm
Roy Lichtenstein But the comics he used epitomized the gender stereotypes of the era
Roy Lichtenstein In 1962 Lichtenstein began his series of war painEngs based on the DC Comic All American Men of War
Roy Lichtenstein, Brattata, 1962
Roy Lichtenstein The theme was topical in 1962 since the United States was at war in Vietnam
Vietnam War fighter jets
Roy Lichtenstein In contrast to the female “damsels in distress,” the men in this series are acEon heroes fighEng wars in vaguely specified locaEons
Roy Lichtenstein, Live Ammo, 1962
Roy Lichtenstein, Live Ammo, (Blang!), 1962
Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, 1962 Yale University Art Gallery
Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam, 1963 Tate Gallery
Detachment The “dramas” Lichtenstein presents are deeply tragic human dramas: love and war
Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, 1962 Yale University Art Gallery
Detachment Yet they are chillingly devoid of emoEon
Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963 Museum of Modern Art
“Lichtenstein was not painting things but signs of things . . . . By turning everything into a form that can be reproduced in newspapers or on television, the media homogenize experience . . . Lichtenstein explored this situation in a cool style that he has consistently described in terms of its formal qualities, as if he had little interest in the subject matter . . . . Lichtenstein’s detachment from the explicit subject is the real subject of his work.” Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1945, p. 261
Detachment Like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein was appropriaEng material from everyday life
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-5
Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive, 1964
Detachment Like them, too, he was painEng images rather than things
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-5
Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive, 1964
"You know, all my subjects are always two-dimensional or at least they come from two-dimensional sources. In other words, even if I'm painting a room, it's an image of a room that I got from a furniture ad in a phone book, which is a two-dimensional source. This has meaning for me in that when I came onto the scene, abstract artists like Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly were making paintings the point of which was that the painting itself became an object, a thing, like a sculpture, in its own right, not an illusion of something else. And what I've been trying to say all this time is similar: that even if my work looks like it depicts something, it's essentially a flat two-dimensional image, an object."http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/kimmelman1.htm
Challenging Aesthe,c Values Lichtenstein quesEoned the disEncEon between abstracEon and commerical illustraEon -‐-‐ and between “high” and “low” art
Roy Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10 (Pier and Ocean), 1915
Cartoonized “Masterpieces” Isn’t a Mondrian just like a flag -‐-‐ an object, a thing, a design?
Roy Lichtenstein, Non-Objective II, 1964
Cartoonized “Masterpieces”
Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Beach Ball, 1977
DS: And what about the paintings which are adaptations of fine art images, your Picassos and your Mondrians?
R L: I kind of wish you'd explain them to me, because it really doesn't do the same thing. It takes something which is already art and apparently degrades it. It's like a five-and-dime-store Picasso or Mondrian. But at the same time it isn't supposed to be non-art. It's a way of saying that Picasso is really a cartoonist and Mondrian is too, maybe. I don't really know. I don't think I understand it, but I think that it's a way of making cliches that occur in Picasso more cliched - a way of re-establishing them but also making them not a cliche. I think that it does just that.http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/sylvester1.htm
Cartoonized “Masterpieces” Lichtenstein also “cartoonized” the signature brushstroke of Abstract Expressionism
Roy Lichtenstein, Yellow Brushstroke I, 1965
Roy Lichtenstein, Little Big Painting, 1965 Whitney Museum of Art
“What Lichtenstein has given us is a set of images which look like the kind of painting that had been so recognizable to American audiences by the mid-1950s, called Action Painting or Abstract Expressionism. But it's an image of that work. It's a completely flat canvas . . . there's no trace of the artist's hand there at all . . . so we know this is a kind of work of art that makes reference to mechanical printing. And that was the last thing the Abstract Expressionists wanted. They resisted mass culture . . . At the same time that this looks like an image of an abstract painting, he's made a very successful kind of abstract painting, with these wonderful tones of white and red and yellow. So he's doing both at once. He's able to parody the work of the generation that preceded him. But he's also found a way in that process to make his own really powerful abstract composition.” Michael Lobel Whitney Museum of Art
Challenging Aesthe,c Values Is there really any difference between a dot, a drip, a spla^er, or a brushstroke?
“DS: Because those brush-strokes are cliches, aren't they? They've become cliches of contemporary art. I suppose that Rauschenberg was the first person to comment on this when he made a very slashing dribbly abstract expressionist painting and then made a duplicate of it. That, I take it, was the first move in this direction.” http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/sylvester1.htm
Andy Warhol Andy Warhol was born in Pi^sburgh and studied commercial art at the Carnegie InsEtute of Technology
Andy Warhol, Photo Booth Self-Portrait, c. 1963 Metropolitan Museum
Andy Warhol Launched a successful career in New York as an award winning illustrator and designer
Andy Warhol, Shoe of the Evening, 1955 Museum of Modern Art
Andy Warhol In 1960 he began painEng pictures based on banal subjects such as adverEsements and newspaper tabloids
Andy Warhol, Oil Heater, 1961 Museum of Modern Art
Andy Warhol, Dr. Scholls, 1960 Metropolitan Museum
Andy Warhol He also began exploring cartoons, but gave them up when he saw Lichtenstein’s work
Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960
Andy Warhol The early works were loosely painted, with drippy paint that made them look like “art”
Andy Warhol, Before and After I, 1960 Metropolitan Museum
Andy Warhol In later versions he explored more impersonal methods that internalized the mechanical style of commercial imagery
Andy Warhol, Before and After II, 1960
“The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol The discovery of the photo silkscreen process allowed Warhol to create impersonal painEng using a mechanical method of mass produced recycled media imagery
“That’s probably one reason I’m using silk screens now. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me ” Andy Warhol
Jackson Pollock: “I am nature” Andy Warhol: “I want to paint like a machine”
Jackson Pollock: “I am nature”
“Pop is everything art hasn’t been for the last two decades . . . It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and oversaturation of abstract expressionism . . . Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola . . .The self-conscious brush stroke and the even more self conscious drip are not central to its generation. Impasto is visual indigestion.” Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana, Love, 1967. Screenprint Museum of Modern Art
Andy Warhol In 1963 Warhol began painEng consumer products like Campbell’s Soup and Coca Cola
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Can, 1964 Silkscreen on canvas
Andy Warhol Like Jasper Johns’ Flag, the images were representaEons of familiar symbols – product labels for Campbell’s soup and Coca Cola
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55
Andy Warhol Each canvas is 20 X 16” and arranged in a grid, evoking mass-‐producEon and a supermarket display
The number 32 refers to the number of varieEes of soup flavors
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup, 1962 Museum of Modern Art
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup, 1962 Museum of Modern Art
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup, 1962 Museum of Modern Art
“When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.” Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol The Campbell’s Soup painEngs were first exhibited in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles
A nearby gallery filled its front window with Campbell’s cans and a sign that said: “Buy them cheaper here.”
Andy Warhol The arEst then began creaEng replicas of Brillo boxes and other products, constructed out of wood
Andy Warhol, Brillo, 1964. National Gallery of Canada
The Readymade
Andy Warhol, Brillo (Soap Pads), 1965 Rubell Family Collection, Miami
“By making the cartons non-functional and uprooting them from their ordinary context, Warhol forces us to look at them freshly. They comment on the way that commercial packaging transforms a mundane, household product into a glamorous, desirable commodity. Warhol also focuses our attention on the significance of these objects as representatives of the impersonal, commercialized consumer society in which we live.” National Gallery of Canada
The Readymade
Andy Warhol, Brillo (Soap Pads), 1965 Rubell Family Collection, Miami
“People in a capitalist society . . . begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object . . .”
Celebri,es In addiEon to commonplace “products,” Warhol also did portraits of celebriEes
Andy Warhol's Liz Taylor on display in Londonhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123864/3-jumble-sale-sketch-turns-Warhol-artwork-valued-1-3m.html#ixzz1zfXUuYlT
Celebri,es The pictures were not painEngs of “people,” but copies of their mass-‐produced publicity photos
Andy Warhol, Liz, 1964 Metropolitan Museum
Celebri,es
“Liz is presented as a cultural commodity "packaged" for public consumption. Warhol creates icons that reflect society's worship of the evanescent gloss of material culture” http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/eyeinthesky/warhol.html
Andy Warhol, Liz, 1964 Metropolitan Museum
Celebri,es The Marilyn series was also based on publicity photos, not “life”
Andy Warhol, Turquoise Marilyn 1962
Celebri,es In his Gold Marilyn, he treats the media star like a religious icon
Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn, 1962 Museum of Modern Art
Celebri,es In his Marilyn Diptych he mimics the mass-‐producEon process by which the girl, Norma Jean Baker, was transformed into media icon
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962 Tate Gallery
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962 Tate Gallery
The Warhol Persona Warhol transformed himself into a depthless media icon: an “image, with no content
Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, 1987
Warhol became a mirror, his conversation limited to "Oh, gee" and "Gosh" and—rarely honestly—"That's great.” http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/47184/index3.html
The Warhol Persona
Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, 1986
“The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.” Andy Warhol
The Warhol Persona
Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, 1983 Tate Gallery
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Andy Warhol
James Rosenquist James Rosenquist began his career as a commercial billboard painter
James Rosenquist with one of his paintings
James Rosenquist He used these skills to create billboard-‐sized painEngs that drew upon the imagery and impact of contemporary adverEsing
James Rosenquist, Hey! Let’s Go for a Ride!, 1961
James Rosenquist Rosenquist’s images oien juxtapose unrelated images, mimicking the informaEon overload of contemporary society
James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford 1961 Moderna Museet, Stockholm
“I’m amazed and excited and fascinated about the way things are thrust at us, the way this invisible screen that’s a couple of feet in front of our mind and our senses is attacked by radio and television and visual communications, through things larger than life, the impact of things thrown at us, at such a speed and with such a force that painting and the attitudes toward painting and communication through doing a painting now seem very old fashioned . . .” James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford 1961
James Rosenquist In President Elect an image of the newly elected John F. Kennedy is combined with a woman’s hand holding a piece of cake and a fragment of a car
James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1964 Pompidou
James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1964 Pompidou
James Rosenquist The first “TV President” in history, Kennedy was an icon of a new kind of media celebrity
James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1964
James Rosenquist By picturing the newly elected American President amongst emblems of luxury commodiEes, Rosenquist drew a direct connecEon between “democracy” and “consumerism”
James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1964
“The face was from Kennedy's campaign poster. I was very interested at that time in people who advertised themselves. What did they put on an advertisement of themselves? So that was his face. And his promise was half a Chevrolet and a piece of stale cake.” James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist Rosenquist’s most famous painEng is his 86 foot long F-‐111 -‐-‐ a response to the arms race and American involvement in Vietnam
James Rosenquist, F 111, 1964-65 Museum of Modern Art
“It is the newest, latest fighter-bomber at this time, 1965. This first of its type cost many million dollars. People are planning their lives through work on this bomber, in Texas or Long Island. A man has a contract from the company making the bomber, and he plans his third automobile and his fifth child because he is a technician and has work for the next couple of years. The original idea is expanded, another thing is invented; and the plane already seems obsolete. The prime force of this thing has been to keep people working, an economic tool; but behind it, this is a war machine.” James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist, F 111, 1964-65 Museum of Modern Art
James Rosenquist, F 111, 1964-65 Museum of Modern Art
The Factory
Art 109A: Art since 1945
Westchester Community College Fall 2012 Dr. Melissa Hall
The Warhol Persona In 1963 Warhol established a studio at 231 East 47th Street which became known as the "Factory"
Ugo Mulas, Andy Warhol at the Factory, East 47th St., New York. Image source: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/84/warholmulas.jpg/sr=1
The Warhol Persona
“It wasn't called the Factory for nothing. It was where the assembly-line for the silkscreens happened. While one person was making a silkscreen, somebody else would be filming a screen test. Every day something new.” John Cale
Gerard Malanga silk screening with Andy Warhol in the Factory, c. 1965. Image source: http://www.wornthrough.com/2012/01/
The Warhol Persona Warhol treated art like a business, and the Factory operated like a large corporaEon
“Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist . . . Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business – they’d say ‘Money is bad,’ and ‘Working is bad,’ but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Andy Warhol
Films In the early 1960’s Warhol shiied to making films
Image source: https://www2.bc.edu/~doann/andyfilms.html
Films Influenced by John Cage’s aestheEc of “found sound,” the films did not have a plot or script
Andy Warhol lines up a shot during the filming of Taylor Mead's Ass at his studio, The Factory, New York, 1964. Photograph: Fred W McDarrah/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
Films In Kiss, for example, the enEre film consists of a couple making out
Andy Warhol, Kiss, 1964
Films Empire is a staEonary shot of the Empire State building that lasts for eight hours and five minutes
Andy Warhol, Film Still from Empire, 1964
Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Grils, 1966 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvOnRdMi4OM
“With Chelsea Girls, a 1966 movie about people who hung out in the Chelsea hotel, they made the Variety charts—and, according to Morrissey, a profit of $100,000. They also struck the deepest nerve to date” http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/47184/index3.html
The Velvet Underground Warhol also became involved in the music industry, and sponsored the the revoluEonary pop group the Velvet Underground
1967, Andy Warhol with Nico, Lou Reed, and The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground For Warhol and his circle, the emerging pop music scene was the new avant garde
The Velvet Underground Rock concerts were “Happenings,” with an emphasis on experience
Beatles Concert, 1966
Celebrity Warhol himself achieved “rock star” celebrity
Andy Warhol stands in front of a limited edition serigraph of Princess Grace of Monaco to benefit the Institute of Contemporary Art here in Philadelphia on June 1, 1984 http://www.upi.com/enl-win/e2ed527418b55cd6865c593144382a06/
“In the fall of 1965, when Andy and Edie went to his opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, nearly four thousand people crushed into the two small rooms and the staff had to take the paintings down for security. It was an art opening without art.” Jonathan Fineberg, p. 256
Celebrity
Beatles Concert, 1966
“I wondered what it was that made all those people scream,: Warhol later recalled. “I’d seen kids scream scream over Elvis and the Beatles and the Stones – rock idols and movie stars – but it was incredible to think of it happening at an art opening . . . But then, we weren’t just at the art exhibit – we were the exhibit, we were the art incarnate” Andy Warhol, cited in Fineberg, p. 256
Celebrity The Factory days came to an end when Warhol was the vicEm of a near fatal shooEng
Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, 1969, from The Sixties Image source: http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-12-07/art/fully-booked/
Celebrity The shooter was Valerie Solanos, a fringe member of the factory crowd, and sole member of a radical feminist group called S.C.U.M. (the Society for Cujng up Men)
Valerie Solanos Image source: http://hilobrow.com/2010/04/09/valerie-solanas/
Celebrity Warhol’s wounds were nearly fatal, and the arEst was scarred for life
Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, 1969
Cri,cal Recep,on But Pop art was hugely successful, and it changed the art world forever
http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/newsweekapr1966.htm
“Until pop arrived, vanguard American art had fought its battles in private. “Up through the fifties and even in the early sixties,” Hilton Kramer says, “the New York galleries showing serious art you could count on the fingers of two hands. By the end of the sixties, the number of galleries had increased by four or five hundred percent. Pop art not only changed the tone of the art world, it changed its size.” ”Tony Scherman, “When Pop Turned the World Upside Down”
Cri,cal Recep,on In 1964 Life magazine asked if Roy Lichtenstein was the worst arEsts in the U.S.
Most established criEcs thought he was
http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/lifemagroy.htm
“Abstract expressionism had drawn the artist’s gaze inward, to a purely subjective realm. What was hard for its artists and ideologues to accept about pop was its reversal of this gaze, its redirection of the artist’s awareness outward: to the teeming, exciting, vulgar new world of early-sixties America. Pop argued that the world was worth looking at—and it won the argument. Tony Sherman, “When Pop Turned the World Upside Down”
The Death and Disaster Series
Art 109A: Art since 1945
Westchester Community College Fall 2012 Dr. Melissa Hall
The End of Camelot Pop art developed during a transiEonal Eme in American history
PoliEcal AssassinaEons John F. Kennedy (1964) Malcolm X (1965) Robert Kennedy (1968)
MarEn Luther King (1968)
Race Riots 1965: Wa^s Race Riots
1966: Chicago, New York, Cleveland, BalEmore
1967: Detroit, Newark, Rochester, New York, Birmingham, New Britain
Race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, August 11-15, 1965 http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/1960.htm
Police subdue an injured rioter during race rights riots in Newark, N.J. (Three Lions/Getty Images) http://abcnews.go.com/US/popup?id=3371026
An,-‐War Movement
Pulitzer prize winning photograph of Kent State Massacre by Paul Filo, 1970
Vietnam War Protest in Washington, D.C. by Frank Wolfe, October 21, 1967 http://farm1.static.flickr.com/110/272804879_3142f28321.jpg
Detachment Detachment:
A mirror of society? A psychological defense mechanism?
Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with a Ball, 1961 Museum of Modern Art
Death and Disaster Series Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series engaged directly with the violence of the era
Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash), 1962
Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet (Plane Crash), 1962
When did you start with the “Death” series?
“I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like, “4 million are going to die.” That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.” http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2404
Death and Disaster Series Car crashes
Race riots The electric chair The assassinaEon of JFK
Andy Warhol Ambulance Disaster, 1963
Death and Disaster Series News photographs photo-‐silkscreened onto canvas, with li^le alteraEon
Andy Warhol Ambulance Disaster, 1963
Death and Disaster Series Car crashes
Race riots The electric chair The assassinaEon of JFK
“We went to see Dr. No at Forty-second Street. It’s a fantastic movie, so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood, I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them—it’s just part of the scene—and hurting people. My show in Paris is going to be called “Death in America.” I’ll show the electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures.” Andy Warhol http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2404
Andy Warhol, White Burning Car, 1963
Andy Warhol, Birmingham Race Riot, 1963. Tate Gallery
Andy Warhol, Red Race Riot, 1963
Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1964. Tate Gallery
Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster: Electric Chair, 1963 http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=21767&searchid=15486
“You’d be surprised who’ll hang an electric chair in the living room. Especially if the background matches the drapes.” Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol, 16 Jackies, 1964 Walker Art Center
“People sometimes say the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually its the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, its like watching television -- you don’t feel anything.” Andy Warhol
“During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real gain. That’s what more or less happened to me.” Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol, 16 Jackies, 1964 Walker Art Center