Pop Art
Leland High School Sculpture Spring 2006
Pop Art Subject matter
• The subject matter of Pop Art is rooted in everyday life; it mirrors contemporary reality and provokes and reflects upon cultural change.
What is Pop Art?
• The term for an influential cultural movement of the sixties. • Pop Art is a style of art which explores the everyday imagery which is part of contemporary consumer culture. Common sources include advertisements, consumer product packaging, celebrities, and comic strips.
Examples of student work
• “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it , and you know it.” Andy Warhol
Pop Artists
George Segal
Clas Oldenberg
Andy Warhol Roy Lichtenstein
• George Segal • [American Pop Sculptor, 19242000]
Roy Lichtenstein
[American Pop Artist, 1923-1997]
• Lichtenstein became known to an enormous public as "the guy who paints comics," but in fact the comic-strip phase of his work was quite brief: it lasted from 1961 to 1965, after which he moved on to other subjects and themes.
[American Pop Artist, 1928-1987]
• In 1960 he made his first pictures based on comic-strips and company trade names. In 1962 he produced his silkscreen prints on canvas of dollar notes, Campbell's Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, etc.
Claes Oldenburg [Swedish/American Pop Sculptor, Born 1929]
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Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg’s work frequently is called a “combine”. A combine is a painted surface with threedimensional found objects, fragments from newspapers and magazines, postcards, and other scavenged imagery. Eventually, Rauschenberg began to create combines less than paintings than sculptural assemblages with intermittent areas of paint,twodimensional clippings, and pictures glued to the surface, plus found objects such as tires, umbrellas, suitcases, and in one celebrated instance, a stuffed sheep.
The key aspect of Rauschenberg’s combines is the artist’s fearless use of disparate, seemingly unrelated “real world” materials salvaged from junk heaps, mass media, and his own life, unified by his keen sense of composition into a single work that manages to be both organized and messy, arbitrary yet peculiarly logical.
Andy Warhol’s soup can
Jasper John’s Pop Art Flag is a direct reference to the signs of everyday life.
Clas Oldenberg
George Segal’s “Walk Don’t Walk”
• Cast from life • Addresses the anonymity and isolation of urban street life
Lichtenstein’s reference to comic books benday dots
Clas Oldenburg
• He bases his sculptures on everyday objects but modifies their function and meaning by giving them extremely large dimensions, making them out of different materials—hard becomes soft and soft becomes hard-and giving them new colors.
Clas Oldenberg’s soft sculptures
Cardboard toilet
Soft toilet Soft telephone
“The Store” by Clas Oldenberg
Cake with a dripping caramel sauce
• • • • Slab technique Cut 2 triangles Cut 3 rectangles Create a crumbly texture
Curves like this lend themselves to coil technique
• Look to details • Be sure it is hollow with newspapers inside
A giant strawberry!
• This shape lends itself to coil technique • Don’t forget newspaper on the inside
A huge stack of pancakes
Slab technique
Ice-cream bars with animal prints!
• • • • Zebra Cheetah Giraffe Tiger
Pineapple
• Use coil technique • Newspaper inside
Slab
Slab technique and hollow inside
• Add details of lettuce etc. on outside • No solid hamburgers!
Oldenburg’s Giant Hamburger
Oldenburg tie in Frankfort Germany