Pop Art
I love pop art, it's perhaps my favorite style (it's a toss up with the Pre-Raphaelites). But I can certainly see why some hate it. When someone walks into a museum and sees a reproduction of a Brillo box, there's little in between. And Andy Warhol's Brillo box was just one of the pieces in the pop art exhibition at the Princeton University Museum of Art, which I took a look at this past Saturday.
Several artists familiar to me were represented: Roy Lichtenstein (perhaps my favorite artist), James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz and of course Andy Warhol. But I found a few artists I didn't know as well, such as Edward Ruscha, who has a great painting of a gas station on Route 66, and Tom Wesselman, who works in a variety of materials (one of his still lifes, of an apple and a radio, is in Grip-Flex on Uvex Plastic, while another, a beach scene, is Alkyd on steel) has several evocative pieces.
What is pop art? Well, from what I understand, it's basically a melding or art and mass media, whether it be advertising slogans, comic strips, everyday objects, or photojournalism. This mixture creates an "either you get it or you don't" opinion about what the definition of art is. When Andy Warhol made silk screen of Campbell's Tomato Soup cans, the art wasn't in the recreation, as any decent art student could do it, it was coming up with the idea to make a soup can a piece of art in the first place. This was sort of the culmination of where art was headed after the invention of photography, when painting was freed from being photorealistic, and went off into impressionism, abstraction, and finally pop art.
Some of it I like more than others. As I said, I really dig Lichtenstein, who used comic strip images in much of his work. Those works aren't in the Princeton exhibit, but I did like a sculpture/painting, a brushstroke in oil on bronze. Though it's simply a brushstroke, it's unmistakeably the work of Lichtenstein. I also like the work of Rosenquist, who mixes bold colors with collages of images taken from newspapers and magazines. I'm less thrilled with Oldenburg, who is famous for his "soft" sculptures. At Princeton were some of his sculptures of food, like a chocolate sundae and blueberry pie a la mode, which did make me hungry.
The artists of this movement, if they are still alive, are now in their seventies, and still working, as many of these works are from the last ten years. Pop art, it seems, is like rock and roll: it's here to stay.
Several artists familiar to me were represented: Roy Lichtenstein (perhaps my favorite artist), James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz and of course Andy Warhol. But I found a few artists I didn't know as well, such as Edward Ruscha, who has a great painting of a gas station on Route 66, and Tom Wesselman, who works in a variety of materials (one of his still lifes, of an apple and a radio, is in Grip-Flex on Uvex Plastic, while another, a beach scene, is Alkyd on steel) has several evocative pieces.
What is pop art? Well, from what I understand, it's basically a melding or art and mass media, whether it be advertising slogans, comic strips, everyday objects, or photojournalism. This mixture creates an "either you get it or you don't" opinion about what the definition of art is. When Andy Warhol made silk screen of Campbell's Tomato Soup cans, the art wasn't in the recreation, as any decent art student could do it, it was coming up with the idea to make a soup can a piece of art in the first place. This was sort of the culmination of where art was headed after the invention of photography, when painting was freed from being photorealistic, and went off into impressionism, abstraction, and finally pop art.
Some of it I like more than others. As I said, I really dig Lichtenstein, who used comic strip images in much of his work. Those works aren't in the Princeton exhibit, but I did like a sculpture/painting, a brushstroke in oil on bronze. Though it's simply a brushstroke, it's unmistakeably the work of Lichtenstein. I also like the work of Rosenquist, who mixes bold colors with collages of images taken from newspapers and magazines. I'm less thrilled with Oldenburg, who is famous for his "soft" sculptures. At Princeton were some of his sculptures of food, like a chocolate sundae and blueberry pie a la mode, which did make me hungry.
The artists of this movement, if they are still alive, are now in their seventies, and still working, as many of these works are from the last ten years. Pop art, it seems, is like rock and roll: it's here to stay.
Oh How INTERESTING. (Sarcastic of course)
ReplyDeleteBut thanks for the Pop artists, i needed their names for google search on images. Hahah.