Arts and Paintings that Changed the World since the 1960s - Essay Example

Question: Discuss arts and paintings that changed the world since the 1960s with reference to Pop Art. Center your work on 2 or 3 artists. Introduction to Pop Art The term ‘Pop Art’ talks about a stylistic development that occurred in the Western art between 1960 and 1670s in Great Britain and the United States. It is related to the developments in Europe during the same period.Pop art has three main unique characteristics. Firstly, it’s both figurative and realist, compared to the avant-garde art which had not been since its very beginnings with Courbets’s Realism. Courbet issued a manifesto of Realism in the Paris Courrier du dimanche in 1961. He said that for an artist the work of art has to involve ‘bringing to bear his faculties on the ideas and objects of the period in which he lives’. He had stated the same six years earlier, in his rather personal manifesto in the catalogue of his 1855 exhibition: To word, to make a living art, that is my aim.’ This is a very important idea that artists must contend with in the contemporary world since it’s the basis of pop art. Secondly, Pop Art was created in New York and London, and its view is on the very special world of the mid-twentieth-century metropolis. Unmistakably, Pop is rooted in the urban environment. Additionally, Pop looks at special aspects of that environment which because of their associations and cultural level seemed impossible as subjects of art. These included: comics and picture magazines, the world of popular entertainment, Hollywood movies, pop music and fairgrounds; consumer durables, foodstuffs and even money. Thirdly, pop artists treat this subject matter in a special manner. For instance, they insist that a soup can or comic strip is simply a ‘motif, an excuse for a painting, like an apple in a still-life by Cezanne. Roy Lichtenstein, for instance has said before that: ‘Once I am involved with the painting I think of it as an abstraction. Half the time, they are upside down anyway when I work.’ On the contrary, while in a Cezanne the motif is a familiar one, and it’s easy for the viewer to ignore it and focus on the formal qualities of the painting, in Pop Art this motif is by no means familiar and thus strongly engages the viewer’s attention (Rubin 162). Not only is the motif new, its presentation was startlingly literal and looked more like the real thing than ever before in art’s history. The outcome was a kind of art combining the abstract and the figurative in a new way. It was realism, though done in the full knowledge of all that happened in modern art since the time of Courbet. The next part of the discussion focuses on the major Pop artists, namely Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Roy Lichtenstein Roy Lichtenstein best articulated the Pop artists’ view on Abstract Expressionism. He stated explicitly: ‘art has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art, it is Utopian, it has less to do with the world, it looks inward.’ He again made a comment on the situation in the late 1960s when Abstract Expressionism had become successful: ‘ It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it- everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody was used to this. The thing every person hated was commercial art; apparently they didn’t hate that enough either (Fitzpatrick 129).’ Roy Lichtenstein began painting in 1951 with pictures which were mainly reinterpretations of artists concerned with the opening of the West, for instance Remington, and with subject matter in Indians, cowboys and treaty signings. In 1960 he began putting images into those paintings, for example Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny. Interestingly, he began his use of advertising and comic strip imagery. In the next few years he became the most prominent New York Pop artists. Lichtenstein’s work was drawn from advertising, Roto Broil (1961), Woman in Bath (1963) which revealed his uncanny ability to organize the rudimentary but vital signs of his original sources into unified, coherent and powerful formal structures while maintaining references to the original so strong that the viewer is constantly kept in touch with the figurative image, with its source (advertisements and comics) and of the physical facts of painting like color, form, composition, and line. Roto Broil Woman in Bath Andy Warhol Born in Pittsburgh, USA in about 1928, Andy went to Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1945 to 1949, then moved to New York and remained there. He worked as a successful commercial artist in the 1950s, winning the Art Director’s Club Medal for Shoe advertisements in 1957. He published a number of books on drawings and organized one-man exhibitions of drawings. His life style at this time was comfortable and elegant, and he collected art. He had a taste for Surrealist paintings (Wilson 111). In 1960, Warhol began to make paintings based on comic strips and advertisements. On of his earliest of these is Dick Tracy of 1960, which has a strong Abstract Expressionist influence. The caption is partially hidden by a loosely painted brushed paint, with drips of paint running down over Tracy’s face, and that of his companion treated fairly as hard, comic-strip outline, then partly again as loosely painted brush. Unlike Lichtenstein though, Warhol quickly abandoned comic-strip imagery and began work on commercial and popular images which were less obviously chosen by the artist, with an eye to their visual quality and content. Undeniably one of the crucial qualities of Warhol’s images is their extreme obviousness; his most famous brands, Coca-Cola, Campbell’s Soup; most famous people, Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe; and the most familiar objects, newspapers and dollar bills. Marilyn Diptych Cow Wallpaper Claes Oldenburg Claes was an artist born in 1929 in Sweden. He first came to the United States when his father was on a diplomatic mission in New York. His family moved to Chicago in 1936 and he grew up there. He moved to New York after taking a degree in Art and Literature. Right from the beginning, Claes had a remarkably strong sense of engagement with the urban setting, but in a different aspect of it from that which had drawn the attention of Warhol and Lichtenstein. The streets, in particular, fascinated me. They seemed to have an existence of their own where I discovered a whole world of objects that I had never known before. Ordinary packages became sculptures in my eye, and I saw street refuse as elaborate accidental compositions. The results of this activity, his first mature works, were shown in two exhibitions at the Judson Gallery in 1959 and 1960. The second exhibition was called The Street, and consisted of figures, signs and objects constructed from discarded or fragile materials: cardboard, paper, sacking, string. Many of the works were Ray Guns — strange objects made in a variety of materials but based on the ray gun of space comics, a kind of mascot and basic form for Oldenburg that engenders endless variations (Whiting 174). It is a symbol of the city itself- Ray Gun spelt backwards is Nug Yar, which Oldenburg says sounds to him like New York - and as a phallic symbol also it relates to another of Oldenburgs fundamental preoccupations: the erotic. By and large, the exhibition was an extraordinary poetic evocation of the city through the medium of some of its humblest and least valued materials. Giant Fireplug Trowel Scale B Works Cited Rubin, G. Susan. Whaam! The Art and Life of Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Books for Young Readers, 2008. Print. Wilson, Simon. Pop Art. Modern Art, 11 Nov. 2004. Web. 04 Nov. 2011. Whiting Cecile. Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s. California: University of California Press.2006. Print. Read More