Pop Art in 1960’s
In Green Coca-Cola Bottles, Andy Warhol selected an icon of mass-produced, consumer culture of the time, the Coca-Cola bottle. The familiar curved Coke bottle was part of the visual imagery American consumers encountered frequently. In so doing, Warhol used a visual vocabulary that reinforced the image’s connections to consumer culture. The technique of printing for rendering the painting’s surface further reinforced the painting’s relationship to the then-current consumer milieu in which print media was so frequently encountered, and of course is still frequently encountered. The repetition and redundancy of the Coke bottle is merely reflective of the product’s virtual omnipresence in American society. The silk-screen technique allowed Warhol to print the image a multitude of times. The bottles are of course very similar to one another, but also obvious are variations one to the other. So immersed was Warhol in a culture of mass production that he not only produced numerous canvases of the same image but also name his studio “The Factory”.
Roy Lichtenstein began producing Pop Art paintings–based on the imagery of consumerism and popular culture–in the early 1960s, and he is most often associated with paintings and prints based on comic strips. When once asked how he selected his images, the artist explained, “I go through comic books looking for material which seems to hold possibilities for painting, both in its visual impact and the impact of its written message. I try to take messages which are kind of universal . . . completely meaningless or so involved that they become ludicrous.”
Oldenburg explores the ironic and humorous aspects of common objects by grossly distorting them in scale, shape, and material. He is noted for soft sculptures of stuffed cloth and giant objects . His gigantic monument, Lipstick, was erected at Yale in 1969. Since the 1970s many of his works have been monumental outdoor installations and most have been executed in collaboration with his second wife, the Dutch artist and curator Coosje van Bruggen. Oldenburg’s work is represented in many major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, both in New York City.
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