Andy Warhol We have seen photographs of the electric chair, and of Marilyn Monroe, we have seen Campbell Soup ads, but never in the isolation and starkness of Warhols presentation. The attitude implicit in his choice of images is much more complex than simple satire, grotesqueness, horror or celebration: We are forced to the personal confrontation in his art with the most vivid representations of sex, food and death but always through the intermediary of previous exposure through movies, the press, television, the entire black and white world of photo-reproduction. We have before us the essential symbols of our daily life drained of their force through repetition. In their isolation and repetition in Warhols paintings the symbols regain their vigor though they must always be seen through the haze of second-hand familiarity so many find offensive in his work. Marilyn Monroe paintings are the strongest of Warhols works. Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct for vulgarity and a precise feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in one of the exemplary myths of our time. Andy Warhol was hardly thinking of Manet when he stencilled a photograph of Marilyn Monroe on canvas, but his act is not so completely different as might be expected, given the intervention of a century of changing values. The novelty of the repeated images of Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Coca-Cola bottles is not great.
Warhols docile acceptance of a world which other artists, even other pop artists, have rejected as, at the very least, depressing, as well as his decidedly unpoetic work, clearly marks him as the primitive of the pop art scene. Warhol established himself as a pioneer of pop with cool, clinically exact and scrupulously deadpan paintings of Campbells soup cans. Impersonality was also evident in the celebrity portraits. Each was made from a tabloid or movie-magazine photo. And frequently, Warhol let assistants complete a painting or a sculpture for him. Warhols art is also a comic, often sarcastic comment on the affluent society, with its ceaseless production and consumption of goods and celebrities. The America of Warhols art is one in which endless soup cans, tooth-paste tubes and Brillo boxes invade our attention as ceaselessly as the parade of celebrity faces at whom we gaze forever on TV, in magazines and on jumbo posters.
The Term Paper on Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe Paintings
... circle. (Roemer, CK. “Looking at Great Art Practice.” Http://www.studiocodex.com. N.p., 2007. Web.) Warhol gives his Marilyn Monroe paintings a subtle heart shape with the curves ... major part of the Pop art movement. Jennifer Rosenberg of About.com quoted pop art as being, “a new style of art that began in England ...
Once selected, the Campbells can began to generate nostalgia. Warhol was careful to modulate this identification, creating resonance between self and other, icon and object, art and mass production. The manner in which he displayed the soup cans reveals his desire to balance empathetic iconic identification with the perception of the image as an external other, especially of forces concentrated at the sites of commerce. Finally, some consideration should be given to the portraits Warhol has done. In the long run, it may be these works which emerge as his best, because in the portraits, especially in those of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, the artist has carried his theme of the machine product to its logical conclusion — people as machine products, commercial property. The portrait of Elizabeth Taylor is representative of Warhols portraiture. Warhols idea of a persons public mask, his commercial aspect, exhibited in the portraits relates at once to the artists personal behavior. Warhols own personal mask, discussed earlier, doesnt seem unlike those in his portraits, and when one considers the commercial aspect of the portraits it becomes clear that the function of the mask is, in both instances, the same. This offering by Warhol of himself as probably the best example of his art allows him to fit in perfectly with the art world that surrounds him and is his, as well as his contemporaries, primary outlet. When Warhols images are taken together, they present a sort of ho-hum, everyday American world. We seem to be only a step away from Depression America.
The Essay on Art History Portrait Analysis
I will be comparing the portrait of Norman “The Red Man” 22nd Chief of Macleod by Allan Ramsay to the portrait of Louis XIV by Riguad. Allan Ramsay was Scottish and lived during the 18th century, which was probably the only time that Scotland shook off its reputation of being barren and poverty-stricken. Ramsay's painting portrays, from the face down, a romantic chieftain wearing ancestral tartan. ...
We go from pictures of dollar bills and S&H Green Stamps to Campbells soup cans, from pictures of Elvis Presley and Natalie Wood to newspaper images of an electric chair and freakish disasters. Warhols best works are his serial paintings, in which the same image is repeated on a single canvas. (He didnt invent serial painting, but he used it to an extent that nobody else has.) We see, sitting right next to one another, or sometimes overlapping on another, two or five or a dozen or an uncountable number of something. It might be Coke bottles, Marilyn Monroes face (or lips), or Jackie Kennedy at the Presidents funeral. In reproduction these paintings can appear facetious, even brutal. But the actual pictures have a powdery and breathing surface; you want to get close to the canvas itself.
Warhol took his images from photos in magazines and newspapers. He had a silk-screen print made of the image, and then he ran colors through the screen directly on the canvas. When he wasnt printing in black on colorless canvas, hed paint the canvas a single color first and then print on it in black, and he produced a large number of surprising color harmonies. Essentially, Warhol was a printer on canvas who appears to have done everything in a hurry. He clearly didnt care about smudges, dribbles, or inconsistencies in color and intensity, yet he didnt strive for sloppiness, either. The smudges and dribbles dont seem willed, and thats a key element in his success.
Warhols art forecast and then highlighted the changes that were occurring in 1960s. In reviewing the critical record, one can conclude that Warhols role in art history is as a transitional figure. Stylistically his work is a bellwether, and the critical issues raised about him often converge with those at the center of the modern/postmodern debate.
Bibliography:
Andy Warhol – Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol Buchloh Benjamin H. D. The Andy Warhol Line in The Work of Andy Warhol. Dia Art Foundation, Seattle: Bay Press ( 1989): 52-69.
The Term Paper on Andy Warhol and Pop Art
Pop Art The pop art movement began in London during the 1950's and then quickly spread throughout nearly all of the industrialized world. Although the artists did have some overlapping styles, pop art focuses more on the subject and less on style, which was left up to each individual artist. The main themes that is evident in all pop art revolves around modern social values. The style in which ...
Campbells Soup Cans – Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbells_Soup_Cans Smith Patrick S. Andy Warhols Art and Films. Aim Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986. Stuckey Charles F. Warhol in Context. Seattle: Bay Press, 1989..
