Pop Art. I decided to cover the topics Pop Art in Great Britain and Andy Warhol. In the section Pop Art in Great Britain I also included some of my favourite works by British Pop Artists and in the end I added some of the most famous Warhol`s works as we

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POP ART AND ANDY WARHOL

Übersetzen und Dolmetschen

Englisch: Kulturschwerpunktthemen a

Karl-Franzens Universität, Graz

Datum: 10.06.2008


TABLE OF CONTENTS

AIM OF MY ESSAY                                                                        3

POP ART                                                                                 4

SOME WORKS BY THE MOST FAMOUS BRITISH POP ARTISTS                6

ANDY WARHOL – “THE KING OF POP ART”                                        8

ANDY WARHOL`S PAINTINGS                                                        10

MY PERSONAL OPINION ABOUT ANDY WARHOL                                12        

ANDY WARHOL`S FAMOUS QUOTATIONS                                        13

AIM OF MY ESSAY

I first got to know about Andy Warhol and Pop Art at the same time, when I was about 15 years old and got a diary with Warhol`s pictures, as a present. I was amazed by the pictures and photos, which said so much about the nowadays society. When that year was over and so was the diary, I cut the pictures out and put them on a wall in my room. My absolute favourite at that time was a picture of two noses, a long, not really nice one and another, beautiful one. I have always thought it shows a woman before and after a plastic surgery operation. On one hand the picture is so simple, that you maybe wouldn`t even refer to it as art in the first place, but on the other, this simplicity in fact is that certain point that makes it so great and creative.

I have to admit, I really tried hard but did not manage to find out, what the title was and whether my theory was right or not. On the internet I found this mentioned picture with the text »The Jewish Nose, The American Nose« under it. I do not know, if this is the original title but if so, it would, of course, give the picture a completely different meaning. But however, it still would be very up-to-date. And exactly that is what I like about pop art. Not only does it manage to connect our lives, our society with art, it also presents “everyday objects”, the things which are so normal for us, in a special way. A way that makes us become aware of certain things, about which we normally wouldn`t think about at all. In my opinion it has a lot to do with philosophy and psychology and this is the reason, why I am so interested in it.  I did not know a lot about it, before I started writing this essay and I have to say it was an ideal opportunity to widen my horizon on this topic.

I decided to cover the topics Pop Art in Great Britain and Andy Warhol. In the section Pop Art in Great Britain I also included some of my favourite works by British Pop Artists and in the end I added some of the most famous Warhol`s works as well. Therefore, the size of my essay turned out to be slightly larger than expected.

POP ART

WHAT IS IT?

The abbreviation of Popular Art, Pop Art is a 20th century art movement that utilized the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. It uses common everyday objects, primarily images in advertising and television. The term Pop art was first used by an English critic, Lawrence Alloway in 1958, in an edition of Architectural Digest.

POP ART IN GREAT BRITAIN

British pop art arose out of a new understanding of contemporary life. It was intellectual, interdisciplinary and programmatic in character. As quite a lot of sources state, it`s emergence as an artistic phenomenon was gradual, developing out of the wider cultural context in Britain at the time.

In the early fifties artists and intellectuals began to realize that their culture was increasingly determined by the mass media, by new technology and by social change, and that this process was also leading to the increased Americanization of Europe. This cultural transformation was not reflected in the introverted, expressive, abstract - figurative art of the older generation of British artists, such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland or Barbara Hepworth. It was, however, with these conditions in mind that the Independent Group was convened in 1952 to hold informal discussions and cultural events at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. The Group was not large, nor did it convene particularly frequently. Despite their heterogeneous cultural and professional provenance, its members found an area of contact in the interdisciplinary interests of the Group. But it was also this heterogeneity which determined the sheer variety of subjects they discussed and the priority they attached to approaching problems from an anthropological rather than artistic point of view.

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Two members of the Group, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, are generally seen as the father of London's pop art. The starting signal was a lecture held at the first meeting of the Independent Group in 1952. The lecture, entitled Bunk, was delivered by Eduardo Paolozzi, who was born of Italian parents and brought up in Scotland. Bunk was a kind of projected collage using pictures mostly from American illustrated magazines, from comics and science fiction literature; a jumble of images from the media and advertising. Projected onto screens, their insistent banality and trivial components were intensified to irritating effect.

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