Warhol MOOC

Week 1
Introduction to Pop Art
Video Transcript
Andy Warhol is normally identified as a key figure in the history of Pop art. But
what was Pop art? Where did it come from, who were its main players, and
was it really a movement?
1962 is usually identified as a key year in the history of American Pop art.
Between December 1961 and the autumn of 1962, several of the key figures
associated with Pop art had solo shows in New York, including Andy Warhol,
James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein. On the 13th of December 1962, a
symposium on Pop art was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It
was organized by the curator Peter Selz. Five individuals took to the stage to
discuss Pop art, including the critic Leo Steinberg and the curator Henry
Geldzahler. In the audience for the symposium was Andy Warhol, Roy
Lichtenstein, and many others. The panelists, however, were largely critical of
Pop art. Geldzahler stood up for the movement. Others, however, criticized it.
Their main argument was that Pop art was not a critical art movement, that it
reveled in the surface pleasures of popular culture and the mass media rather
than necessarily offering any insight.
Pop art, most historians agree, actually had two births, one in the United
States and one in the United Kingdom. The one in the United Kingdom starts
slightly earlier. It starts in the 1950s. In the 1940s, the Institute of
Contemporary Arts was founded in London. In the 1950s, a group of
individuals who became known as the Independent Group started to organize
events symposia, talks, and exhibitions at the ICA. That group included
the critic Lawrence Alloway, the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, the architect
Rayner Banham, and many others. This core group were interested in popular
culture and wanted to look at it and discuss it in a way similar to high art.
Individual members of the Independent Group are identified as having made
key contributions to the history of British Pop art. The critic Lawrence Alloway
is often identified as the first person to use the phrase Pop art, although he
has subsequently said that he was using it to refer to examples of popular
culture rather than necessarily what we now think of as Pop art. The artist
Eduardo Paolozzi produced collages which are now seen as proto-Pop,
important precursors of Pop art. But its perhaps Richard Hamilton that made
the most important contributions. In fact, Hal Foster in his book The First Pop
Age names Hamilton as one of five key figures in the history of Pop art. In
1956 Hamilton made a collage called Just What Is It That Makes Todays
Homes So Different, so Appealing, which appeared as one component of an
exhibition called This is Tomorrow at Londons Whitechapel gallery.
American Pop art, then, did have precursors, including the work that was
being produced in the United Kingdom during the 1950s. Bradford Collins in
his book Pop Art actually suggests that one of the roots of Pop art is an essay

written in 1863 by Charles Baudelaire called The Painter of Modern Life.

Baudelaire, in this essay, argues that painters should be dealing with the
materials of modernity. They should be engaging with the ephemeral and the
transitory. Collins suggests that this inaugurates a lineage of modern art
which runs throughout the late 1800s and into the 1900s, where we can see
individual artists engaging with elements of popular culture. To take just one
example, we could look at the work by Kurt Schwitters, For Kte, which was
made in 1947, which includes aspects of comic books as part of its content.
Some artists working in the early 20th century laid the groundwork for Pop art
more than others. One key figure is Marcel Duchamp, an artist associated
with Dada. Duchamps great innovation was to put readymade objects into a
gallery space, having made minimal alteration to them, including a snow
shovel, a comb, and a bottle rack. Perhaps his most famous work is
Fountain, which he made in 1917, a porcelain urinal which he signed R.
Mutt. We could productively compare some of Warhols sculptural works,
including his Brillo boxes, first shown at the Stable gallery in New York in
1964, to Duchamps readymades.
Although there are significant precursors of Pop art, its also important to
recognize that it was a reaction against the major art movement that preceded
it, Abstract Expressionism. In the late 1950s, a large exhibition of Abstract
Expressionist work toured major art galleries in Europe, before finally ending
up at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That show, The New Realist
Painting, featured work by 17 different artists including Mark Rothko, Franz
Klein, and Jackson Pollock, individuals that we now associate with Abstract
Expressionism. By the late 1950s, however, Abstract Expressionism was on
the way out. Critics were already beginning to discuss what the next art
movement would be. Histories of art often identify that Abstract Expressionism
and Pop art are almost diametrically opposed to each other. Pop art is
representational rather than abstract, and it is concerned with the domestic,
the feminine, and the everyday, rather than spiritual ideals expressed through
a macho idiom, which is much more what Abstract Expressionism was
concerned with.
But what exactly is it that marks out Pop art as different from work by artists
who also engage with everyday and vernacular culture? For Bradford Collins
in his book Pop Art, he suggests that the distinction is in how much the
original materials have been transformed. Pop artists, he suggests, have
made very little change to the materials that they have appropriated and used
as the basis for their art. For that very reason, he suggests that Pop art is a
mode rather than a movement.