SHGC Pop Art - Part 2
- 1. Girl with Ball 1961
- 3. Whaam 1963
- 4. WHAAM – 1963 (magna on canvas) two panels Source is cheap throwaway comics By simplifying and enlarging creates a style of monumental presence – intersection of popular culture and high art He was excited by the fact that “One of the things a cartoon does is to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanical and removed style - “ here depicts mindless violence – theme of war Pictorial structure (formal quality) outweighs emotive considerations Strong black outlines, narrow range of colours of comics, applied through screens to simulate printed reproductions
- 6. Hopeless – 1963 (oil on canvas) Theme of love – banal subject matter/stereotyped imagery From comic – by using subject matter that had already been processed into a 2D medium Lichtenstein was not painting things, but signs of things – representational but not realist Creates an iconic image, removes from comics the sense of the strip – opposes the narrative character of comics – his works are integrated wholes rather than the progressive frames of a real comic strip. Lichtenstein used assistants from 1964 onwards 1962 – paintings dealing with the theme of art – quotations from other artists (eg. Cezanne, Mondrian, Picasso etc) and other styles – parody – anti art
- 8. Brushstrokes of 1965-66 parody of Ab-Ex automatic brushstroke – mimics the serious, transcendental concept, but ridicules it by making it look mass-produced and comic book-like. Deliberately dumb (Kitch) Irony in the way in which Lichtenstein uses his meticulous technique to simulate a gestural process – hefty swipes of impasted paint No evidence of the hand of the artist apparent in the work – reaction to AbEx artists getting ‘into’ their paintings Mocking tone as seen in a lot of pop art – benday dots Shows pop-art concern that something does not have to be serious and thoughtful to be considered art Blown up benday dots mean “reproduced material, but I think they also may mean the image is ersatz or fake – the dots indicate a fake brushstroke in my brushstroke paintings” – sense of double take
- 10. 1964 -1969 paints Architectural Monuments and Lanscapes Shows Lichtenstein concerns with cliché – also increasing interest in colour and unified imagery Temple of Apollo Depicts High monuments by means of low quotations – eg. Postacrd in Temple of Apollo Benday dots larger now – continuous surface – planes of solid colour – bare minimum of contour and colour Seascape 11 1964 Allusion to colouristic field painting
- 11. Girl Drowning
- 12. Drowning girl Young woman crying herself a river. Drowning in emotion and has abandoned herself to it’s destructive force Would rather die then cry out for help More sophisticated finished drawing technique as opposed to the stiff awkwardness of Girl with Ball Hardens images by using fewer more definite shapes and colours Almost all the paintings have the primary colours, along with black, white and green
- 14. In the Car 1963
- 15. Young woman’s face is shown repeatedly through out is work – although in later works she becomes more polished. A beautiful girl is a good girl, unless there is some suggestion that she isn’t Waiting and crying girls exude a vulnerability in their beauty – empty and seductive
- 16. Maybe 1963
- 17. Pop eye 1961
- 18. figurative - Describes artwork representing the form of a human, an animal or a thing; any expression of one thing in terms of another thing. Abstract artwork is the opposite of figurative art in certain ways. Roy Lichtenstein made a series of images of a bull, demonstrating this kind of range in ways to approach figuration and abstraction \ beginning with the most highly figurative version, and proceeding through stages to the most abstract version:
- 19. Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997), the six prints in the "Bull Profile Series," Bull I Bull II Bull III Bull IV Bull V Bull VI
- 20. Claes Oldenburg
- 21. Banal everyday objects eg, hamburgers, clothes pegs, garden hose, light switch, toilet – familiar to viewer but re-presented as art – acts to reject the beauty that has been traditionally important in art. Techniques – sculpture Soft sculptures Giant objects made out of canvas, filled with foam rubber, kapok Muslim soaked in plaster – often fast food items like hamburgers His projects are colossal monuments Opened a shop called ‘The Store’ (1961) – Sold artworks in shop context – painted plaster replicas of food and other domestic objects – obsession with food (mass produced) a transitory, base idea Celebration of modern, commercial life – asserting the worthiness of everyday life as a subject in the art world – questions the validity and dominance of ‘high art’
- 22. Sensual imagery – larger than life – interested in values attached to size (big = noticeable, worthy of consideration?/ contemplation) Drumkit – soft sculpture – functionless, contradictory (usually hard) – becomes an art object – anything as art – pushing the boundaries of what was art. Uses two main devices to transform his objects. He changes scale or size so the sculpture takes up the whole room. He charges the medium so that what is normally hard, such as a toilet or typewriter is made floppy.
- 36. sculptors. In the early 60's he set up a store in a retail district of New York stocked with plaster sculptures which were equivalents of the "real" items available in the neighbourhood. At this time he was also involved in performance pieces. His subsequent work has, typically, involved the redefinition of everyday objects with changes of scale and a characteristic change of material. Hard objects (like a drum-kit or car engine) become soft, small insignificant objects (like a clothes-peg or teaspoon) become monumental.
- 37. Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is a sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large and very hard versions of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of normally hard objects. Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of a Swedish diplomat. As a child he and his family moved to America in 1936, first to New York then, later, to Chicago. He studied at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he studied under the direction of Paul Wieghardt at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1954.
- 38. The most memorable aspects of Oldenburg's works are perhaps, the colossal sculptures that he has made. Sculptures, though quite large, often have interactive capabilities. One such interactive early sculpture was a soft sculpture of a tube of lipstick which would deflate unless a participant re-pumped air into it. In 1974, this sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was redesigned in a sturdier aluminum form, the giant lipstick being placed vertically atop tank treads. Originally installed in Beinecke Plaza at Yale, it now resides in the Morse College courtyard.
- 39. Many of Oldenburg's giant sculptures of mundane objects elicited public ridicule before being embraced as whimsical, insightful, and fun additions to public outdoor art. In the 1960s he became associated with the Pop Art movement and attended many so-called happenings, which were performance art related productions of that time
- 40. This brash, often humorous approach to art, was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas. But Oldenburg's spirited art found first a niche then a great popularity that endures to this day. He has collaborated since 1976 with Dutch/American pop sculptor Coosje van Bruggen. They were married in 1977. In addition to freestanding projects, he occasionally contributes to architectural projects, most notably the Chiat\Day advertising agency headquarters in the Venice district of Los Angeles, California -- the main entrance is a pair of giant black binoculars.
- 41. Jasper Johns
- 42. Jasper Johns. Born 1930 American painter and printmaker, forerunner of Pop art, who uses commonplace emblematic images such as flags or numbers as the starting-point for works of great richness and complexity. Born in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in South Carolina. Studied at the University of South Carolina ,then moved in 1949 to New York. Two years military service, part of the time in Japan. From 1952 the artist lived in New York. Made his first 'Flag', 'Target' and 'Number' paintings in 1954 and 1955 his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1958 won him immediate recognition. Since 1960 has also made nearly 300 lithographs, etchings, screen prints, and embossed paper and lead relief’s.
- 43. Target with four faces 1955
- 45. Flag, 1954-55 Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood 42 x 61 in.
- 47. e ncaustic - The medium, technique or process of painting with molten wax (mostly beeswax), resin, and pigments that are fused after application into a continuous layer and fixed to a support with heat, and achieves a lustrous enamel appearance. The solvent for encaustic is also heat.
- 48. Figure 7, 1969, colour lithograph on Arjomari paper
- 49. Flags, 1968, color lithograph 34” X 25”
- 50. In 1954, after a dream about the American flag, Jasper Johns painted the first of his American flag series. A struggling artist in New York City he painted, during the next three years, more flags, as well as targets, stenciled numbers or letters, and other emblems that filled the entire surface of the canvas, forcing an awareness of the painting as the object itself. Johns exhibited his first flag paintings at the important Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. From that time, flags, along with his other "borrowed" images, are associated in the public mind with Jasper Johns. Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Southerners, close friends, similar in age, neighbors who lived in the same building and saw each other's work daily, are credited with inspiring the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art in the 1950s. Each artist, in his own way, reintroduced figurative subject matter to painting, yet retained the painterly gesture of the earlier generation. Johns makes us see familiar objects in a different way by utilizing optical illusions. If you stare at the top flag long enough, then shift your focus to the gray flag below, it seems to take on the familiar colors of red, white, and blue.