Pop Art - page 6
Keywords: The History of the Pop Art movement 1950s-60s
By s19 on 07/11/2006 18:13:55
Level: A Level (Year 12) / AS Level
Page Number: 6 of 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
printing process, also plays a part in de-humanising his work.
Andy Warhol’s was a key figure in the Pop Art movement and he is often thought of as the creator of the Pop lifestyle. Warhol, a painter, graphic artist and film-maker was regarded as a cult figure. His experience as a graphic artist meant he had previously worked within the industry that he later used as his subject matter. In the 1960s, he started to make paintings of famous American products like Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola. He then switched to silkscreen prints, seeking not only to make art of mass produced items, but to mass produce the art itself. A lot of Warhol's works revolve around the concept of American culture. He painted money, dollar signs, food, groceries, women's shoes, celebrities, and newspaper clippings. To him, these subjects represented American cultural values. He used popular imagery and methods to visualize the American cultural identity of the 20th century. This popular redefinition of American culture is a theme and result of Warhol's art. Because American culture has had great international influence, Warhol did as well.
In the 1960s, Warhol also created several “mass-produced” images from photographs of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley. In the portrait of Monroe below, her face is presented as an impenetrable mask in bright luminous colours. The portrayal of her as a product of mass culture, packaged for the public as if a consumer item, connects this work to the American Pop Art movement. The Fauves used non-representational colour and representional form to convey different sensations. If we apply the same idea to the print of Marilyn, we can see that the colour affects the mood of the picture. Unlike the Fauve colours, the non-representational colours of pop art do not depict the artist’s inner sensation of the world. They refer to popular culture that also inspired Warhol to experiment with the technique of silkscreen printing, a popular technique used for mass production.
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