Pop Art Research Paper

Kelly Stanton
ARH4642
June 3, 2005

Lichtenstein: The Evolution of Pop

Pop art seems to have emerged as a result of consumer culture in America, and also in a response – partly in accordance, partly in divergence – to abstract expressionism. Pop art during the sixties created a union of high art and low art – and now the low was overriding the high. The early sixties saw the techniques of the avant-garde used in commercial design (p 449), and it seems somehow fitting that in turn, commercial design would somehow find its way into the halls of high art. Pop artists – Lichtenstein in particular - retain some of the values of modernist painting, but in a way that greatly negates it; in pop art the representational images is back and
The content of pop artists' work was seen as the low art of iconic images overriding the high art that had been established through modernism. Lichtenstein chose as his content iconic images – cartoons, comic strip figures, whereas an abstract expressionist artist like Pollock considered his painterly stroke to be autographical; it was representational of the artist himself – if you could identify with an abstract expressionist painting, you could identify with the artist himself. Pop images from Lichtenstein and Warhol were copies, were pre-made; they were nonrepresentational of the great artist's personality and practices such as silk screening were viewed as a lack of originality in
He admitted to wanting to change them as little as possible from the original image he was copying, but with his use of Ben Day dots he created a kind of signature style; his paintings are in fact easily recognizable as his own (449). Though no one could claim that these dots had submerged from the artist's subconscious – or that he'd even invented the technique – they are still a kind of autograph, one that mocks the abstract expressionist idea of autograph and personality projected onto