At first glance, Pop Art might seem to glorify popular culture by elevating soup cans, comic strips and hamburgers to the status of fine art on the walls of museums. But, then again, a second look may also suggest a critique of the mass marketing practices and consumer culture that emerged in the United States after World War II.<\/p>\n
Andy Warhol\u2019s Gold Marilyn Monroe<\/i> (1962) clearly reflects this inherent irony of Pop. The central image on a gold background evokes a religious tradition of painted icons, transforming the Hollywood starlet into a Byzantine Madonna that reflects our obsession with celebrity. Notably, Warhol\u2019s spiritual reference was especially poignant given Monroe\u2019s suicide a few months earlier.<\/p>\n
Like religious fanatics, the actress\u2019s fans worshipped their idol; yet, Warhol\u2019s sloppy silk-screening calls attention to the artifice of Marilyn\u2019s glamorous fa\u00e7ade and places her alongside other mass-marketed commodities like a can of soup or a box of Brillo pads.<\/p>\n
In this light, it\u2019s not surprising that the term \u201cPop Art\u201d first emerged in Great Britain, which suffered great economic hardship after the war. In the late 1940s, artists of the \u201cIndependent Group,\u201d first began to appropriate idealized images of the American lifestyle they found in popular magazines as part of their critique of British society.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Pop Art\u2019s origins, however, can be traced back even further. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp asserted that any object\u2014including his notorious example of a urinal\u2014could be art, as long as the artist intended it as such. Artists of the 1950s built on this notion to challenge boundaries distinguishing art from real life, in disciplines of music and dance, as well as visual art.<\/p>\n Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s desire to \u201cwork in the gap between art and life,\u201d for example, led him to incorporate such objects as bed pillows, tires and even a stuffed goat in his \u201ccombine paintings\u201d that merged features of painting and sculpture. Likewise, Claes Oldenberg created The Store<\/i>, an installation in a vacant storefront where he sold crudely fashioned sculptures of brand-name consumer goods.<\/p>\n These \u201cProto-pop\u201d artists were, in part, reacting against the rigid critical structure and lofty philosophies surrounding Abstract Expressionism, the dominant art movement of the time; but their work also reflected the numerous social changes taking place around them.<\/p>\n The years following World War II saw enormous growth in the American economy, which, combined with innovations in technology and the media, spawned a consumer culture with more leisure time and expendable income than ever before. The manufacturing industry that had expanded during the war now began to mass-produce everything from hairspray and washing machines to shiny new convertibles, which advertisers claimed all would bring ultimate joy to their owners.<\/p>\n Significantly, the development of television, as well as changes in print advertising, placed new emphasis on graphic images and recognizable brand logos\u2014something that we now take for granted in our visually saturated world.<\/p>\n It was in this artistic and cultural context that Pop artists developed their distinctive style of the early 1960s. Characterized by clearly rendered images of popular subject matter, it seemed to assault the standards of modern painting, which had embraced abstraction as a reflection of universal truths and individual expression.<\/p>\n In contrast to the dripping paint and slashing brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism\u2014and even of Proto-Pop art\u2014Pop artists applied their paint to imitate the look of industrial printing techniques. This ironic approach is exemplified by Lichtenstein\u2019s methodically painted Benday dots, a mechanical process used to print pulp comics.<\/p>\n As the decade progressed, artists shifted away from painting towards the use of industrial techniques. Warhol began making silkscreens, before removing himself further from the process by having others do the actual printing in his studio, aptly named \u201cThe Factory.\u201d\u00a0 Similarly, Oldenburg abandoned his early installations and performances, to produce the large-scale sculptures of cake slices, lipsticks, and clothespins that he is best known for today.<\/p>\nPost-War Consumer Culture Grab Hold (and Never Lets Go)<\/h2>\n
Irony and Iron-ons<\/h2>\n