American Pop Art

Examine the mass media's influence on both the formal and iconographic features of American Pop Art. Centre your discussion on one or two examples each of the work of the following artists: Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist.

Pop Art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from mass culture such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the ideas of abstract expressionism which preceded Pop in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The decade of the 1960s was perhaps one of the most provocative, in terms of culture, politics and philosophy, of the 20th century. The amazing growth that transpired in America from the end of World War II through the cold war period of the 1950s resulted in a newly formed consumer culture. In the first years of the decade, Pop artists responded to this new commercialism and embraced consumerism as a fitting subject of their art. Hallmarks of Abstract Expressionism such as expression and gesture were replaced with cool, detached, mechanical illustrations of common objects, often based on advertising images. Basing their techniques, style and imagery on certain aspects of mass reproduction, media-derived imagery and consumer society, Pop artists began to erode the gulf between high art and low art, taking inspiration from advertising, pulp magazines, billboards, movies, television, comic strips, and shop-window displays. For instance, mass produced supermarket food is often the subject matter of its art including hamburgers, French fries, sandwiches, soup cans, soda and beer cans, and cakes.

Among Pop Art's famous examples are Tom Wesselman and his Great American Nude series, Andy Warhol's canonization of the Campbell's soup can, Roy Lichtenstein's blowups of comic strips, James Rosenquist and his juxtaposed image stories and Claes Oldenburg's 'Store'. These artists believed that art had become too inward and unrealistic. They wanted their art to reflect the contemporary world of the mid-twentieth century city; they wanted to reflect a rapidly changing society. What's more, Pop Art investigates the areas of popular taste and kitsch that were previously considered outside the limits of fine art.

Andy Warhol was an avant-garde American artist, filmmaker, writer and social figure. He was one of the founders of the Pop Art movement in the United States in the 1950s and who is claimed to have brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell's soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century.

Andy Warhol had a lifelong interest in movie stars which first surfaced in his art in 1962 when he begun working on portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol attempted to keep his personal fascination with fame from showing through too clearly in his works, preferring to leave their meaning open to the interpretation of viewers. 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 and also for his stylized portraits of the twentieth century celebrity icons, such Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor.

Warhol's early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements. However, cartoons and comics were already being used by fellow artist Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject of his own and his friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. In his signature way of taking things literally, he painted images such as his famous cans of Campbell's soup, which he had for lunch most of his life.

Yet, Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, (1962, The Museum of Modern Art) can also represent other notions. It can depict the cheapness of mass culture. It can also be viewed as a cynical joke about the American collector's artistic nationalism or it may merely illustrate Warhol's genuine love for his mother who constantly fed him canned soup.

Campbell's Soup Cans as well as Warhol's famous Marilyn Monroe, (1962, Leo Castelli Gallery) are silk screened paintings based on the mass produced. These images are often presented in a series by which Warhol repeats the picture a large number of times on the same canvas or on separate canvases. Each image in the series is slightly different from the next one. Warhol utilizes a wide range of color from the monochrome to the vivid and vibrant. In his Campbell Soup painting, numerous rows and columns of red and white Campbell soup cans are painted alongside each other. They are all identical except for the flavor of the soup that is written on each can. Warhol's main aesthetic strategies were based on the fashion industry and mass media advertising. This means that he constantly used reproduction and incessant repetition in the art work. But it was repetition and reproduction without a message. For example, the statement 'Black Bean' on the Campbell's soup can is meaningless when it is reproduced in art, which is exactly how mass advertising works and Warhol wanted his artwork to have this same effect. However, Warhol's Campbell's soup did not only function as an illustration of commercial industry and advertisement, it was an intrinsic part of Warhol's life and memories and popular culture. For him the soup represented a feeling of being at home with family. It was what the mass media declared a 'comfort food'.

Andy Warhol was also particularly fascinated with contemporary icons like Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. His many portrayals of them comment on America's fascination with celebrities as well as the artist's own long-life obsession with fame. Warhol either invented or best understood that concept of mass media celebrity. He saw the 'Celebrity' as plastic, fictive, repetitious, a matter of packaging and something that remained strangely passive. Warhol's Marilyn Monroe portrays all of these elements. Again this painting features rows and columns of recurring images of Marilyn Monroe's face. Each face is identical to the next, the only difference being the pattern of extremely bright colors and shades he uses for each image. Warhol painted in bright colors because they pointed at and highlighted the fabrication of the 'celebrity' notion as well as its media value. It represented the way in which images of such people are trivialized by the media. Therefore Warhol's work functioned as a social comment and also illustrated