Pop Art - From Soup Cans to Marilyn Monroe

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By Kathleen Karlsen

Pop art is one of the most well-known and fascinating art movements in the twentieth century. Pop art was first and foremost a commentary on popular culture and the mass media. The pop art audience was typically young and glamorous.

The methods used to produce pop art were low-cost and the results were mass-produced. The subjects were urban and artificial, often based on magazines, comic books, TV images, billboards and newspaper ads. For pop artists, disposable garbage and street junk represented society's unconscious, a veritable treasure trove of alternative realities. Indeed, pop artists created their own version of distorted reality engineered with visual puns.

The theme of technology and the machine also played a part in pop art, especially in the work of Andy Worhol (1928-1987). Worhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and his Marilyn Monroe Diptych, both of 1962, mimicked the advertising industry and the repetitious printing of tireless machines. Worhol claimed pointedly that he wanted "to be a machine" and his gimmicky wit was big business for a short while.

Another pop artist, Jasper Johns, took familiar symbols such as flags, targets, and maps and gave them multiple levels of meaning through texture, stenciled words and numbers and other visual manipulations. Johns was famous for incorporating a variety of media in his work such as encaustic wax and plaster relief.

Artists like Robert Rauschenberg, creator of the well-known goat-in-a-tire Monogram (1955-9), made sculptural combinations of different objects and materials that were clearly unlike traditional stone sculpture in either technique or subject matter. Rauschenberg's "combines" were thoughtful and provocative, but not beautiful. He was not attempting to fulfill the traditional edict to glorify or immortalize man. Instead, Rauschenberg brought forbidden topics such as homosexuality to the forefront in a humorously explicit way.

Although criticized vehemently as difficult to understand and highly intellectual, pop art remains one of the most influential movements in the many-faceted history of modern art. The emphasis on the self and the conflict between traditional idealism and the sometimes unsightly images of man's emotional and psychological realities were played out in full view for all to see.

Kathleen Karlsen, MA is an artist, writer and design consultant residing in Bozeman, Montana. Fine art and unique gifts by Kathleen and other selected artists can be found at http://www.livingartsoriginals.com Visit us today to find a wonderful addition to your home decor or a gift for someone special! For an extensive article about flower symbolism see http://www.livingartsoriginals.com/infoflowersymbolism.htm To see a selection of available flower paintings, please visit http://www.livingartsoriginals.com/originalfloralart.htm

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