American Pop Art Essay - 2717 Words

Examine the mass medias 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†¦show more content†¦Campbells Soup Cans as well as Warhols 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. Warhols main aesthetic strategies were based on the fashion industry and mass media advertising. This means that he constantly used reproduction and inc essant repetition in the art work. But it was repetition and reproduction without a message. For example, the statement ‘Black Bean on the Campbells 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, Warhols Campbells soup did not only function as an illustration of commercial industry and advertisement, it was an intrinsic part of Warhols life and memories and popular culture. For him the soup represented a feeling of being at home with family. It was what the mass mediaShow MoreRelatedPop Art And Its Influence On American Culture786 Words   |  4 Pagesâ€Å"If Pop art was a from of realism, it was a realism that represented the ways American consumer culture had altered the perception of reality itself. Pop artists imagined themselves confronting a world in which the scale and compass of consumer capitalism, with its near-total saturation of society, exceeded tr aditional perceptual structures (Miller 598). Pop Art movement took place in various cities but mainly in New York in the sixties and became popular within two or three years. 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