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25-22 JASPER JoHNS, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 2'
6f' X 3' 9t". Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (50th
Anniversary Gift of the Gilman Foundation, the Lauder Foundation,
and A. Alfred Taubman).
American Pop artist Jasper Johns wanted to
draw attention to common objects people view frequently but
rarely scrutinize. He made
many paintings of targets, flags, numbers, and
alphabets.
flag painting in 1954 at the height of the Cold War. Ini-tially
labeled a Neo-Dadaist because of the kinship of his works to Marcel
Duchamp's readymades (FIG. 24-27), Johns also had strong ties to
the Surrealists, especially Rene Magritte, whose painting of a pipe
labeled "This is not a pipe" (FIG. 24-56) is conceptually a
forerunner ofJohns's flags-for example, Three Flags (FIG. 25-22),
which could easily carry the label "These are not flags." In fact,
when asked why he chose the American flag as a subject, Johns
replied he had a dream in which he saw himself painting a flag. The
world of dreams was central to Surrealism (see Chapter 24).
In Three Flags, Johns painted a trio of overlapping American
national banners of decreasing size, with the smallest closest to
the viewer, reversing traditional per-spective, which calls for
diminution of size with dis-tance. Johns drained meaning from the
patriotic em-blem by reducing it to a repetitive pattern-not the
flag itself but three pictures of a flag in one. Nevertheless, the
heritage of Abstract Expressionism is still apparent. Al-though
Johns rejected the heroic, highly personalized application of
pigment championed by the 1950s action painters, he painted his
flags in encaustic (liquid wax and dissolved pigment; see
"Encaustic Painting," Chap-ter 7, page 218) mixed with newsprint on
three overlapping canvases. His flags thus retain a pronounced
surface tex-ture, emphasizing that the viewer is looking at a
handmade painting, not a machine-made fabric. The painting, like
the flags, is an object, not an illusion of other objects.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG A close friend of Johns's, ROBERT
RAUSCHENBERG (1925-2008) began using mass-media images in his work
in the 1950s. Rauschenberg set out to create works that would be
open and indetermi-nate, and he began by making combines, which
intersperse painted passages with sculptural elements. Combines
are, in a sense, Rauschenberg's personal variation on assemblages,
artworks constructed from already existing objects. At times, these
combines seem to be sculptures with painting incorporated into
certain sections. Others seem to be paint-
25-23 ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Canyon, 1959. Oil, pencil, paper,
fabric, metal, cardboard box, printed paper, printed reproductions,
photograph, wood, paint tube, and mirror on canvas, with oil on
bald eagle, string, and pillow, 6' 9-;l-" X 5' 10" X 2'. Sonnabend
Collection, New York. Robert Rauschenberg/ Licensed by VAGA, New
York.
Rauschenberg's "combines" intersperse painted passages with
sculptural elements. Canyon incorporates pigment on canvas with
pieces of printed paper, photographs,
a pillow, and a stuffed eagle.
802 Chapter 25 MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM IN EUROPE AND
AMERICA, 1945 TO 1980
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ARTISTS ON ART
Roy Lichtenstein on Pop Art
I n November 1963, Roy Lichtenstein was one of eight painters
interviewed for a profile on Pop Art in Art News. Gene R. Swenson
posed the questions. Some of Lichtenstein's answers follow.
[Pop Art is) the use of commercial art as a subject matter in
painting ... [Pop art ists portray] what I think to be the most
brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, th ings we
hate, but which are also so powerful in their impingement on us
.... I paint directly ... [without] perspective or shading. It
doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing
it-self. Instead of looking like a painting of a billboard ... Pop
art seems to be the
25-24 RoY LICHTENSTEIN, Hopeless, 1963. Oil and synthetic
poly-mer paint on canvas, 3' 8" X 3' 8". Kunst-museum Basel, Basel.
Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.
Comic books appealed to Lichtenstein because they were a
mainstay of popular culture, meant to be read and discarded. The
Pop artist immortalized their images on large canvases.
actual thing. It is an intensification, a stylistic
intensification of the excitement which the subject matter has for
me; but the style is ... cool. One of the things a cartoon does is
to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanized
and removed style. To express this thing in a painterly style would
dilute it. ... Everybody has called Pop Art "American" painting,
but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by
industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner ... I think the
meaning of my work is that it's indus-trial, it's what all the
world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it
won't be American; it will be universal.*
ings with three-dimensional objects attached to the surface. In
the 1950s, assemblages usually contained an array of art
reproductions, magazine and newspaper clippings, and passages
painted in an Ab-stract Expressionist style. In the early 1960s,
Rauschenberg adopted the commercial medium of silk-screen printing,
first in black and white and then in color, and began filling
entire canvases with ap-propriated news images and anonymous
photographs of city scenes.
Canyon (FIG. 25-23) is typical of his combines. P ieces of
printed paper and photographs cover parts of the canvas. Much of
the unevenly painted surface consists of pigment roughly ap-plied
in a manner reminiscent of de Kooning's work (FIG. 25-8). A stuffed
bald eagle attached to the lower part of the combine spreads its
wings as if lifting off in flight toward the viewer. Completing the
combine, a pillow dangles from a string attached to a wood stick
below the eagle. The artist presented the work's components in a
jumbled fashion. He tilted or turned some of the images side-ways,
and each overlays part of another image. The compositional
confusion may resemble that of a Dada collage, but the parts of
Rauschenberg's combines maintain their individuality more than
those, for example, in a Schwitters piece (FIG . 24-29). The eye
scans a Rauschenberg canvas much as it might survey the environment
on a walk through a city. The various recognizable images and
objects seem unrelated and defy a consistent reading, although
Rauschenberg chose a ll the elements of his combines with
specific
THAT'S THE WAY--IT 5HOULD~......_ HAVE BEGUN/ BUT IT:5
HOPELES5
*G. R. Swenson, "What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight
Painters," Art News 62, no. 7 (November 1963), 25, 64.
meanings in mind. For example, Rauschenberg based Canyon on a
Rembrandt painting of Jupiter in the form of an eagle carrying the
boy Ganymede heavenward. The photo in the combine is a refer-ence
to the Greek boy, and the hanging bag is a v isual pun on his
buttocks.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN As the Pop Art movement matured, the images
became more concrete and t ightly controlled. RoY LICHTENSTEIN
(1923-1997), who was born in Manhattan not far from Madison Avenue,
the center of the American advertising in-dustry, developed an
interest in art in elementary school and as a teenager took weekend
painting classes at the Parsons School of Design before enrolling
at Ohio State University. He served in the army during World War II
and was stationed in France, where he was able to visit the Musee
du Louvre and Chartres Cathedral. In the late 1950s, however, he
turned his attention to commercial art and especially to the comic
book as a mainstay of American popu-lar culture (see "Roy
Lichtenstein on Pop Art," above).
In paintings such as Hopeless (FIG . 25-24), Lichtenstein
ex-cerpted an image from a comic book, a form of entertainment
meant to be read and discarded, and immortalized the image on a
large canvas. Aside from that modification, Lichtenstein remained
remarkably faithfu l to the original com ic-strip image. His
subjects were typically the melodramatic scenes that were hallmarks
of
Painting, Sculpture , and Photog raphy 803
I ft.
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"I 25-25 ANDY WARHOL, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962. Oil on
canvas, 6' 10!" X 4 ' 9". Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York.
Warhol was the quintessential American Pop artist. Here, he se
lected an
icon of mass-produced, consumer culture, and then multiplied it,
reflecting Coke's omnipresence in American society.
romance comic books popular at the time and included "balloons"
with the words the characters speak. Lichtenstein also used the
visual vocabulary of the comic strip, with its dark black outlines
and unmodulated color areas, and retained the fam iliar square di
-mensions. Moreover, his printing technique, benday dots, called
attention to the mass-produced derivation of the image. Named
af-ter its inventor, the newspaper printer Benjamin Day
(1810-1889), the benday-dot system involves the modulation of
colors through the placement and size of colored dots. Lichtenstein
thus trans-ferred the visual shorthand language of the comic book
to the realm of monumental painting.
ANDY WARH 0 L The quintessential American Pop artist was ANDY
WARHOL (1928- 1987). An early successful career as a com-mercial
artist and illustrator grounded Warhol in the sensibility and
2525A WARHOL, Marilyn Oiptych, 1962. ~
visual rhetoric of advertising and the mass media. This
knowledge proved useful for his Pop artworks, which often depicted
icons of mass-produced consumer culture, such as Green Coca-Cola
Bottles (FIG. 25-25), and Hollywood celebrities, such as Marilyn
Monroe (1926- 1962; FIG. 25-25A). Warhol
favored reassuringly familiar objects and people. He explained
his attraction to the ubiquitous curved Coke bottle:
What's great about this country is that America started the
tradi-tion 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 is a Coke and
no amount of money can get you a better Co keY
As did other Pop artists, Warhol used a visual vocabulary and a
printing method that reinforced the image's connections to
con-sumer culture. The silk-screen technique allowed Warhol to
print the image endlessly (although he varied each bottle
slightly). The repetition and redundancy of the Coke bottle reflect
the satura-tion of this product in American so-ciety-in homes, at
work, literally everywhere, including gas stations, as immortalized
by GEORGE SEGAL (1924-2000) in 1963 (FIG. 25-258). So immersed was
Warhol in a culture of 25-258 SEGAL, Gas Station, 1963.
mass production that he not only produced numerous canvases of
the same image but also named his studio "the Factory."
CLAES OLDENBURG In the 1960s, CLAES OLDENBURG (b. 1929) also
produced Pop artworks that incisively commented on American
consumer culture, but his medium was sculpture. The son of a
Swedish diplomat who moved to the United States in 1936, Oldenburg
attended school in Chicago and graduated from Yale University in
1950. His early works consisted of plaster reliefs of food and
clothing items. Oldenburg constructed these sculptures of plaster
layered on chicken wire and muslin, paint ing them with cheap
commercial house enamel. In later works, focused on the same
subjects, he shifted to large-scale stuffed sculptures of sewn
vinyl or canvas, many of which he exhibited in a show he titled The
Store-an appropriate comment on the function of art as a com-modity
in a consumer society.
Oldenburg is best known, however, for his mammoth outdoor
sculptures. In 1966, a group of graduate students at the Yale
School of Architecture, calling themselves the Colossal Keepsake
Corpo-ration, raised funds for materials for a giant sculpture that
Olden-burg agreed to create (in secret and without a fee) as a gift
to his a lma mater. The work, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar
Tracks (FIG. 25-26), was Oldenburg's first monumental public
sculpture. He installed Lipstick on Ascension Day, May 15, 1969, on
Beineke Plaza across from the office of the university's president,
the site of many raucous protests against the Vietnam War.
Oldenburg's characteristic humor emerges unmistakably in the
combination of phall ic and militaristic imagery, especially in the
double irony of the "phallus" being a woman's cosmetic item, and
the Caterpillar-type endless-loop metal tracks suggesting not a
tractor-earthmover for construction work but a military tank
designed for destruction in warfare. Lipstick was to be a speaker's
platform for protesters, and originally the lipstick tip was a
drooping red vinyl balloon the speaker had to inflate, underscoring
the sexual innuendo. (Olden-burg once remarked that art collectors
preferred nudes, so he pro-duced nude cars, nude telephones, and
nude electric plugs to please them.)
Vandalism and exposure to the elements (the original tractor was
plywood) caused so much damage to Lipstick that it had to be
removed and reconstructed in metal and fiberglass. Yale formally
accepted the controversial and unsolicited repaired gift in
1974,
804 Chapter 25 MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM I N EUROPE AN D
AMERICA, 1945 TO 1980
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