![]() Rosenquist's training in billboard painting transitioned perfectly into his realistic renderings of those collages expanded onto a monumental scale. As part of his method, Rosenquist collaged magazine clippings from advertisements and photo spreads and then used the results as studies for his final painting. However, rather than produce rote copies, Rosenquist exerted creative control through his surrealistic juxtapositions of products and celebrities, often inserting political messages. James Rosenquist also directly appropriated images from popular culture for his paintings. ![]() ![]() By hand-painting the usually machine-generated dots, and recreating comic book scenes, Lichtenstein blurred the distinction between mass reproduction and high art. Focusing on a single panel within a comic strip, Lichtenstein's canvases are not an exact facsimile, but are rather the artist's creative re-imaging of the composition in which elements may have been added or eliminated, the scale could shift, and text might be edited. He not only adopted the same bright colors and clear outlines as popular art, but his most innovative contribution was also his use of Ben-Day dots: small dots used to render color in cheap mass-manufactured comics. In addition to using the imagery from these mass-produced picture books, Lichtenstein appropriated the techniques used to create the images in comic books to create his paintings. In US, Roy Lichtenstein proved that he could fulfill demands for a "great" composition even though his subject matter derived from comic books. The members of the Independent Group were the first artists to present mass media imagery, acknowledging the challenges to traditional art categories occurring in America and Britain after 1945. In his collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956), Hamilton combined images from various mass media sources, carefully selecting each image and composing the disparate elements of popular imagery into one coherent survey of post-war consumer culture. The Pop art collages of British artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton convey the mixed feelings Europeans maintained toward American popular culture both exalting the mass-produced objects and images while also criticizing the excess. ![]() Their background in the commercial art world trained them in the visual vocabulary of mass culture as well as the techniques to seamlessly merge the realms of high art and popular culture. The majority of Pop artists began their careers in commercial art: Andy Warhol was a highly successful magazine illustrator and graphic designer Ed Ruscha was also a graphic designer, and James Rosenquist started his career as a billboard painter. Whether this suggests an acceptance of the popular world or a withdrawal, has been the subject of much debate. In contrast to the "hot" expression of the gestural abstraction that preceded it, Pop art is generally "coolly" ambivalent. Pop artists believed everything is inter-connected, and therefore sought to make those connections literal in their artwork.Īlthough Pop art encompasses a wide variety of work with very different attitudes and postures, much of it is somewhat emotionally removed. But it is perhaps more precise to say that Pop artists were the first to recognize that there is no unmediated access to anything, be it the soul, the natural world, or the built environment. It could be argued that the Abstract Expressionists searched for trauma in the soul, while Pop artists searched for traces of the same trauma in the mediated world of advertising, cartoons, and popular imagery at large. The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source has been one of the most influential characteristics of Pop art. By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars, the Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between "high" art and "low" culture. ![]()
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