Pop Art“The Landscape of Signs”

POP ART BEGAN IN LONDON (left) Francis Bacon (British, 1909-1992), Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef, 1954, British Existential Figuration; (right) Eduardo Paolozzi (British, 1924-2005), Real Gold, collage, 14 x 19 in., 1950, British Pop

The Blitz: From September 7 1940 through May 1941, the German Luftwaffe bombed British cities, especially London, almost nightly. Here London fire fighters extinguish flames following an air raid. More than 43,000 deaths and 1,400,000 people were made homeless, 4 million homes destroyed or badly damaged.

Eduardo Paolozzi, (right) I was a Rich Man's Plaything  1947; (left) Meet the People, 1948, from Ten Collages from 1952 BUNK lecture, collage mounted on card support, 14 x 9.5 in. “The iconography of a new world.”

Richard Hamilton (British, b. 1922) Just What is it That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? Collage (photomontage), 10 x 9”, 1956, British Pop

1964

Hamilton defined Pop Art in a letter dated January 16, 1957: "Pop Art is: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business."

Jasper Johns (US, born 1930), Three Flags, 1958, encaustic on canvas, 31 × 45 × 5 in.

Robert Rauschenberg (American 1925-2007), Retroactive I, 1963. Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas American Proto-Pop. JF Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963

Andy Warhol, 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, acrylic on canvas, screened with hand painted details, 20x16 in. ea (lower right) Ferus Gallery installation, Los Angeles,1962. Warhol’s first gallery show. Repetition and coldness of appropriation from commodity culture is the hallmark of Pop Art. Five canvases sold for $100 each, but Irving Blum, co-owner of Ferus, bought them back to keep the set intact and later partly gifted them to MoMA NYC.

Warhol, (left) Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, acrylic, silkscreen and oil on canvas; (right) Marilyn, 1962. Series followed Monroe’s (probable) suicide in August 1962.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, acrylic silkscreen on canvas

Andy Warhol, 210 Coca-Cola bottles, 1962, Silkscreen, ink & synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 6’10” x 8’9”

Warhol, (left) Jackie, The Week That Was, 1963 (right) Suicide 1963, Acrylic and silkscreen, 6’ H

Warhol, (left) Lavender Disaster, 1971; (right top and below) Electric Chair, 1971, screenprints. “Everything I do is connected with death.” (Warhol, 1978)

Andy Warhol, Brillo Box, 1964, acrylic and silkscreen on plywood, 17 x 17 x 15 in

“Greenberg’s narrative … comes to an end with Pop … It came to an end when art came to an end, when art, as it were, recognized there was no special way a work of art had to be.” - Arthur Danto (1964)

After the End of Art, 1997

“Is an endless playing with the definition of art all that art now has to offer?”

- Charles Harrison

“Conceptual Art” (Themes)

At the Tate Modern: the conundrum

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997), cover of Newsweek, 1966, New York Pop Art

(right) Roy Lichtenstein (US, 1923-1997), Hopeless, 1963, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 3’8” x 3’8”(left) Tony aAbruzzo, panel from “Run For Love!” in Secret Hearts, no. 83, November 1962, D.C. Comics. Source for Lichtenstein’s Hopeless

James Rosenquist, President Elect, oil on masonite, 12 feet wide, 1960-1 (New York Pop Art); (right) mockup for painting and (below) artist in studio

“I’m interested in contemporary fission – the flick of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Big-bang! Bing-bang! I don’t do anecdotes; I accumulate experiences.”

Rosenquist,(left) right & left halves of F-111, installation, oil on canvas and aluminum, 23 sections, 10 x 86 feet, 1964-5, The Museum of Modern Art, NY

Claes Oldenburg (US, born 1929) The Store, Dec. 1, 1961 - Jan. 31, 1962, Ray Gun Mfg. Co., 107 East Second Street, New York. Roast Beef, 1961, inside studio/store (with artist), view looking out, poster, Green Gallery sponsor.

“I am for an art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”

Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966; Dormeyer Mixer,1965

Oldenburg, Giant Lipstick, erect (left) and limp (center), Yale University, 1969. Anti-Vietnam war

Niki de Saint-Phalle, Hon ("She" in Swedish), 1966. 6 ton colossus (82'/20'/30'). With Jean Tinguely and Per Olaf Ultvedt as a temporary installation at the Moderne Museet, Stockholm. One of a series of “Nana” sculptures

The Carnivalesque

Edward Kienholz (US, 1927-1994), Back Seat Dodge ’38 (two views), 1964, tableau with truncated Dodge and mixed materials (plaster casts, beer bottles, chicken wire, artificial grass, etc.) Los Angeles Funk

Wayne Thiebaud (US, b. 1920), Five Hot Dogs, 1961, o/c, 18 x 24 in, Whitney MAA. Thiebaud earned a BA degree from Sacramento State College in 1941 an M.A. degree in 1952. Thiebaud’s “Pop” work was in The New Realist show at Sidney Janis (1962 NYC) with other major figures associated with Pop, New Realism, and Gutai

In 1961 Thiebaud met and became friends with major NYC gallerist, Allan Stone (1932–2006

Wayne Thiebaud, Boston Cremes, 1962, 14 x 18 in.  In 1962 Thiebaud was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, and Robert Dowd, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum and one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in America.

Robert Arneson, Typewriter, 1966, glazed ceramic, around 6 x 11 x 12 in.UC Berkeley Art Museum

Robert Arneson, John with Art, 1964, glazed ceramic with polychrome epoxy, life size, Seattle Art Museum, gift of Manuel Neri

Robert Arneson, ceramic sculpture California Artist, 1982, on display in front of his studies for the sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

Joan Brown (US, 1938-1990), Fur Rat, 1962, wood, chicken wire, plaster, string, raccoon fur, and nails, 20 x 54 x 14 in. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Bay Area Funk (Beat)

“Like other artists of San Francisco's Beat movement, Brown's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s incorporates everyday materials assembled into new and provocative forms. "There was a rebellion against the slicker materials [and] a delight taken in using rattier materials. The rattier the better.“ Here, Brown has covered a wooden armature with fur from an old fur coat to depict an oversized rat with a menacing tail - an image from one of her dreams.” BAMPFA

Joan Brown c.1960

Joan Brown (left) Wolf in Studio, enamel on masonite, 90 x 48,” 1972, Crocker MA, Sacramento

(right) Self Portrait with Cat and Fish, 1970

Ed Ruscha (US, based in Los Angeles, b. 1937), Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963, oil on canvas, 5ft 5 in x 10 ft/ Pop and Minimalism/ CA car culture

In 1962 Ruscha was included, along with Lichtenstein, Warhol, Thiebaud, et al, in the groundbreaking "New Painting of Common Objects," curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. Ruscha’s first solo exhibition was in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in LA.

Ed Ruscha, Flying A, Kingman, Arizona, from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963, photographic book, sold for $3.50 (An original signed copy is now worth up to $35,000.) Minimalist and California Pop (anti)aesthetic: serial repetition and deadpan view of contemporary reality.

Book cover

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/202 Ruscha on his art (1 minute)

Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, 1863

Ansel Adams, Grand Tetons and the Snake River, 1942

Rusha’s road trip, California ><Oklahoma

Ralph Goings, 2011 exhibition poster, Airstream,1970, oil on canvas, 60 x 85 in. MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna

Chuck Close (US, 1940) Self-Portrait, 1967-8, acrylic on canvas, c. 9 x 6 ft., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

http://youtu.be/zmEf7MKDFd4

Duane Hanson (US, 1925–1996), Woman with Dog, 1977, cast polyvinyl polychromed in synthetic polymer, with cloth and hair, 46 × 48 × 51 in. overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York