Andy Warhol and Pop Art

Any discussion of 20th century art has to include the movement that first came on the American scene in the 1950s along with the man who pioneered that movement. Andy Warhol and Pop Art are nearly synonymous.

Pop Art is born

Pop art arose out of and away from the Abstract Expressionist movement, shifting the emphasis away from the artist's emotional experience expressed in abstract forms that typically bore little relation to reality. In Pop art, a phrase ultimately shortened to Pop, the focus became a celebration of popular culture and the commercialism and mass-production that characterize modern life.

Commercial illustrator turned Artist

Warhol's background as a commercial illustrator for magazines like Harpar's Bazaar is evident in many of his most iconic works. In 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, the artist uses silkscreen to reproduce a familiar and banal consumer product, ironically elevating it to a position of high art. Warhol gave a similar treatment to the Brillo Soap Box in sculptural form.

Pop culture imagery

Because the Pop Art movement is as much an attitude as a method, it is nearly impossible to extricate the art it produced from the cultural scene that spawned it. Andy Warhol chose as his subject matter familiar figures from consumer and celebrity culture, treating them with nearly the same ironic reverence. His silkscreen homage to Marilyn Monroe upon her suicide exemplifies this, rendering the tragic blonde's image over and over, erasing her individuality and emphasizing the reproducible nature of a Hollywood commodity.

Ultimately crowned by critics with the title the Prince of Pop, Andy Warhol created the most iconic images associated with that movement. The combination of Andy Warhol and Pop Art is a marriage of a skilled commercial illustrator with a celebration of cultural icons that produced images that will live forever.