Andy Warhol helped turned the art world upside down with his consumerist pop art of the 1950s and ’60s. His ingenious use of making consumer products art forced the public to think about what art really was, and made fun of our consumer society. Boxes of Brillo pads became something to put in a museum. The mass produced soup cans of Campbell’s became mass produced examples of masterpiece pop art. What was going on in the art world?
Pop art got its origins from the Dada movement of the early 20th century. Dada and its anti-art messages led to a new movement of non-elitist culture centered on giving an alternative to upper crust avant garde styles. Pop art essentially is art from popular culture. It can be Lichetenstein’s comic book paintings, or the American flag of Jasper Johns, or mimicking the advertisements the world was seeing with increased intensity and frequency.
Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan, besides being a hot spot for socialite jet-sets, was first and foremost his studio. There he recruited many assistants to help churn out consumer art which was meant to be produced in high volumes the same way everyday products were. It was there he also made his movies with their purposeful low-budget indie poppish qualities. He also accomplish his silkscreen portraits there, which demanded quite a high price tag from celebrities who weren’t anybody unless they had a Warhol portrait.
Who would have thought a can of pepper pot soup would be art? Why not?
This is just amazing abstract art, isn’t it? It’s reminiscent of Cy Twombly but much, much better. The picture above has hung in a gallery in Brooklyn, New York. If it had hung in a gallery in Old City, Philadelphia, it probably would have gotten the same praise as it did in New York. I can hear it now:
“It speaks to me.”
“Just fabulous,” [as they swish their wine in their plastic cups.]
“Genius, pure genius. Just look how the artist has made such an intellectual statement. The vibrant reds are so emotional, it reduces us to a warm and fuzzy art snob glob of goo just staring at it.”
“I go to art school.”
“This artist is better than any new millennium abstract painter, and certainly better than Cy Twombly and other such scribble artists.”
Of course nobody told them who the artist is, and they probably didn’t read the info on the painting or the “artist’s statement” if any. Mostly, they were interested in hearing themselves talk, giving their avant-garde critique while wearing their berets and scarves.
I’ll give them the fact that the artist above is better than Cy Twombly. Also it is true that the artist has made much more an intellectual statement than any of these folk are capable of giving, and the artwork is done with more skill and the outcome produced is more aesthetically pleasing than any of them are capable of. But only if they knew who painted it:
A DOG!
Yeah it fooled them as I’m sure it fooled most of you. A dog painted this, and sure, for a canine it’s great. I amend my statement- for any abstract artist it’s great! I would die laughing if this little trick was played on the real people who hang around Old City on 2nd street and frequent the First Friday exhibits.
Not everybody is like this, don’t get me wrong- and the art shown is wonderful. It’s just the talentless spectators who cram into these galleries and look down their noses at people. Most are just interested in themselves and couldn’t care less about the art on the walls. But then again, I mostly don’t want to hear their b.s. about the art anyway: “It speaks to me!” It speaks does it? What does it say? It’s a canvas splattered with pink paint selling for $4,000. It doesn’t speak, it screams- “bad taste and overpriced!”
What gets me is that any dog or gorilla could accomplish most of what’s being paraded around as “modern art.” The minimalists of the ’50s were making a statement. They said since art history has been a constant reduction, why not skip straight to zero. That’s funny, and interesting, and they were the first to do it. Some art student today who paints a canvas blue and tries to sell it is not funny, or original, or talented. They may be talented otherwise, but splattering paint or making a blank canvas is not talent, and it’s not art. It’s been done!
I read an article the other day about how art has never really been representational and it’s actually always been abstract. I beg to differ. Since hieroglyphics, and cave art, people have always represented reality in recognizable ways. In ancient Eastern writing, the word for house looks like a little house. (I don’t speak or write in the languages, but you catch my drift.)
Art can be decoration, or can be a symbolic statement of some sort. And, risking getting away from my statement here, I will say abstract certainly has it’s place. Kandinsky comparing art to music is fantastic. He was a genius, and his art is beautiful. You can hear the symphonies and harmony while looking at his vibrant colors and shapes. His art had meaning, as does most of the art of the early abstract artists of the 20th century. Just don’t paint a canvas blue and call it, “A walk in the park while pondering the universe,” and think it’s art.
Even Jackson Pollock said most of his attempts have failed when splattering his paint. Some paintings turned out great and showed real energy and made a statement in force. Other times they just looked like paint splattered on a linen canvas on the floor.
So call it what it is. And don’t call it what it isn’t. Kudos to the art students who really come out with great art. Just don’t think that all art is abstract these days. If the underlining principle behind what the minimalists were saying was true, then art has already reached zero and it’s time to pack up and go home. There isn’t anything left to do. But that simply isn’t true.
If anything, abstraction is the fad. It was a trendy fashionable rage that had it’s time. It’s over now- get over it. But don’t despair. If you cannot paint, paid thousands of dollars for art school and you have no talent, then your paint splatters won’t get you far anyway. But if you have real talent, then create beautiful art. Forget about trends and fashions, and just paint.
If you sit down at a bar and order a “single plum floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat,” then you are a pretentious art snob and you will probably purchase that $4,000 pink blob. You will show all your friends at your cocktail parties and they will call you a genius. The trendy talentless art system needs you. So, give it your support.
If you are a paint splattering art student, study Tillie Cheddar the dog’s artwork. You could learn a thing or two!
What is Pop art? Pop art as a movement started in the 1950s in Britain and the U.S. which takes its art from popular mass culture as opposed to the elite art world. Today the term can still be used for art as an expression influenced from the mainstream culture of the masses.
While Andy Warhol was making his Soup Cans famous in the U.S., a new and exciting art in Japan was starting to form and take on a course of its own.
Tanaami and American Influences
One of the first and most important of the Japanese pop artists is Keiichi Tanaami. He was educated at the Musashino Art University, and would take a designer job after graduation. It wasn’t long before he left the company he worked for due to his busy schedule with outside activities. These creative activities included experimentations with animation, lithograph, illustration, and editorial design.
By the late 60s, Tanaami traveled to the United States where he had an influential meeting with Andy Warhol in his legendary Factory in New York. He was very happy to have met Andy while he was doing his silkscreens, and much of his work was inspired by Andy’s style. Later, after moving to San Fransisco, the Japanese artist’s work became very colorful and psychedelic. He even designed a cover for Jefferson Airplane.
Much of Tanaami’s work comes from dreams and memories. He remembers as a child squeezing goldfish that were about to die, until their guts came out. You can see this in some of his goldfish sculptures. Gruesome and interesting stuff.
Manga and Anime
Perhaps the best known contemporary Japanese artist today is Takashi Murakami. He is attributed with the modern art style known as “superflat,” for a blending of traditional art with newer concepts deriving, in part, from manga and anime. These artworks are known for their flat planes of colorful images.
While Andy Warhol in the 1960s was turning consumer products into art, Murakami is now turning art into consumer products. He says he knows how much the Japanese people love art, but very few can afford the upper class art. So he creates affordable art anybody can afford. His art comes in the form of toys, paintings, sculptures, dolls, and mannequins, T-shirts, videos, and any other type of product readily available for consumers. He also designed a Louis Vuitton handbag.
His art is often colorful and imaginative, such as the painting entitled “727.” Some of his art is daring, such as his (warning: NSFW) “My Lonesome Cowboy.” The “Cowboy” shows an obvious reference to American culture with the lasso made from the, uh, fluids.
Graffiti and Childlike Figures
Like Murakami, Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara derives his style from manga and anime. His work is usually done in graffiti-type painting and the characters are often cute and childlike, but which also possess dark characteristics. These characters come from a meshing of childhood memories and an input of contemporary style. What you get is a unique consumer art product.
There’s an excellent British miniseries called Japanorama, which chronicles the host’s seeking of Japanese culture in general. One of the episodes is all about J-Art and has the above artists and much more. So check it out, and don’t forget to watch it with a nice hot bowl of Ramen.
Good words to live by, it seemed Joan Miro thought as he picked up the broken sign he found near a train station. He put it up in his studio kind of as a “program,” something to keep him motivated. I suppose this metaphor imitated the Catalan artist’s desire to constantly move forward, to grow in life and art, and stop for no one or thing, as time indeed stops for no one.
His career is proof that he lived up to his rusty train sign’s advice. Throughout his career he kept growing and embracing change. He leapt from idea to idea, some influenced by other contemporary artists of early 20th century Paris, most his own. He loathed conventional art methods and strived to constantly innovate and learn new forms of expression. His techniques ranged from painting and sculpture to a blending of the two, to collage, and to wild new ideas such as fog and gas sculptures.
Miro’s art has been classified as Surrealist, especially seeing that he sometimes unofficially called himself one. He met with some Surrealists and Dadaists when he moved to Paris in 1919, where he also met Picasso, also from Catalonia. Yet no matter what group he belonged to (at some stretches none at all), his art was always his own unique creations.
The Harlequin’s Carnival (seen above) marks a change from the figurative to the abstract. In it we see many colorful characters dancing and floating around with a “jack in the box” harlequin in the center playing guitar. Miro was a fan of automatism, or automatic writing and/or drawing, which might explain the haphazard array of fantastical subjects all around.
The funny thing about this painting and others like it is the artist claims to sometimes see these happy little characters in reality. For instance, he explains the Harlequin’s Carnival by saying he came home one day very hungry and laid down. As he looked at the ceiling, these creatures appeared before his very eyes in a hallucinatory display.
Other paintings include his Constellation series, where patterns and images, often connected by lines are shown against a solid background, like the stars.
Pablo Picasso. Is there any other artist so versatile? The man felt it a tragedy if a person stayed the same, with the same style their whole life. The world changes all around, and one must constantly change along with it. The co-inventor of Cubism (along with Georges Braque) had a long, successful, and prolific career as a painter, sculptor, and potter. Nine of his paintings are in the list of the 25 most expensive paintings sold at auction. He is truly one of the most well known artists of the 20th century.
Early Art: Shades of Blue and Red
Pablo Picasso was the son of Jose Ruiz y Blasco, a painter and art professor, perhaps influencing young Pablo into a life of art. But according to his mother, Maria Picasso y Lopez, Pablo’s first word was “pencil,” thus the boy was born to be an artist. Picasso would reflect, “My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” He received his first formal training under his father and began with academic realism. Slowly, being influenced by El Greco and Edvard Munch, he developed a more modernist style.
His career can be broken down into several periods. His Blue Period (1901- 1904), is rightly named for the characteristic somber hues and sad subjects that dominate these canvasses. Often poor mothers with undernourished children, sad lower class families, and overall just depressed people in desolate surroundings were the main subjects. His bleak outlook on life at this juncture was probably the result of losing a friend to suicide.
The Rose Period (1904- 1906) marks a change into a happier era for the artist. “Boy With Pipe” which is the highest selling Picasso at auction, was painted during this period. This happier time was when Picasso met Fernande Olivier and is reminiscent of happier times earlier in his life before the Blue Period. You’ll see many acrobats and Harlequins in this period.
African Influences and Cubism
You begin to see a change in his style in the African Period of 1907 - 1909, away from more realistic representations of everyday people to much more expressive depictions. As the name of the period implies, this is when Picasso was influenced by African culture, particularly works of art in sculpture, which were being brought back to France during their expansion into the African continent. His most important work of this period is the “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Particular importance are the two figures to the right, whose faces resemble African masks, and show the first signs of Cubism.
The “Avignon” painting marked a transition into the Cubism periods, Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism from 1909-1919. Collaborating with Georges Braque, the two men invented a new type of art where the artist would analyze the subject and break it down into its basic shapes. Objects can be depicted two dimensionally but from many different angles and viewpoints. All depth is removed, and the foreground object and background blend and mingle into each other. This style of painting would apply to sculpting and collage, the new method invented by Picasso, Braque and others, of cutting paper and arranging the shapes in a composition.
Later Art: Classical, Surrealist, and Sculpture
Around the time after World War I, Picasso switched to a more classical style, following in the Neoclassical footsteps of Giorgio de Chirico and others. Drawings and paintings of this period often include the minotaur, which would lead into more surrealistic artwork.
It was in the 1930s when Guernica was painted. Probably one of Picasso’s most famous works of art, it shows the horrors of war and the agony of the innocent in detail, as the Nazi bombs drop on the Spanish town.
Picasso got into sculpture and pottery and in the summer of 1949, he along with Jacques Lipchitz and 248 other sculptors exhibited at the 3rd Sculpture International at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the 1950s he would move on to yet even different styles, doing versions of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, and other famous works by Goya and others. He was commissioned to do a 50 foot public sculpture for $100,000 for the city of Chicago. He refused the money and donated it to the people of the city.
Picasso died in 1973, leaving no will, but instead leaving his works, along with many Mastisse’s to France. These works form the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris.
Picasso In Modern Culture
Pablo Picasso is probably the most well known artist of the 20th century. When people are asked to name an artist, any artist, Picasso most often comes to mind first. His innovative styles have been copied by professional and amateur artists alike.
One very good movie about him is “Surviving Picasso” with Anthony Hopkins as the artist. Shot in Paris and outlying areas, it’s about the relationship with the artist seen through the eyes of Francois Gilet, played by Natascha McElhone. The movie shows most of the women in the man’s life, often meeting one another in sometimes awkward and comical ways.
Toward the beginning of the film, Germany occupies France and a few soldiers are inquiring of the value of some of Picasso’s paintings. Picasso had a knack for dealing with people, and often got his way, as he tricks the soldiers into believing the better paintings were really junk, and the bad ones the more valuable. He even gives one of the worser ones to one of the soldiers to give to his wife.
Another scene shows a parlor full of art dealers and collectors impatiently waiting in line to see the great artist, who pays them very little mind. Every so often he will come out and give all attention to one art dealer while completely ignoring all the others, even the ones he knows very well. Once in, a certain groveling collector begs for the most recent “Picasso” so he can take it back to New York. Picasso knows the guy is just kissing up to him, so he has a little fun and asks, “How about this one, you interested?” The man joyously says, “Am I? Of course I’m…uh…” only to see a few lines drawn on a scrap paper.
What actually is art? Give me ten people and I’ll give you ten different definitions of the word. What it means to you is as unique to you as your fingerprints. But who’s to say what qualifies as art, or fine art? What distinguishes the art of Jean Michel Basquiat from Rembrandt van Rijn? Besides the time differences, each artist’s art have been met with different types of criticism. Was one art, and the other just crummy art? Who’s to say?
What we can say though is there is an unmistakable mainstream art circuit with art dealers and galleries, critics and fine artists with or without their MFA’s. Sometimes this crowd can be quite pretentious and judges art in its own way, usually following the natural cycles of fads and trends. What’s hip today may be tomorrow’s old news. That’s just how it is.
But true art and artistry can be found everywhere. Wherever there is creativity there is art. You don’t need to hang around in posh upper class galleries and drink expensive wine to be a real artist.
Jean Dubuffet andArt Brut
“Art Brut” in French literally means “rough” or “raw” art. This was translated to “Outsider Art” in English. It was started by the painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet to describe art that is outside of the official art culture. He knew the value of art which normally doesn’t hang on gallery walls but nonetheless should be recognized and not necessarily written off as lesser art.
Dubuffet mainly focused on the art of the mentally ill in insane asylums. One particularly noteworthy example was Adolf Wolfli. As a mental patient diagnosed with psychosis, he was an extremely prolific artist creating epic novels of 45 volumes with over 25,000 pages and 1600 illustrations. With minimal resources he would slowly create work after work with only one pencil and two sheets of paper a week at his disposal. This meant drawing on tiny bits of paper, using small stubs of pencils, and anything he could find or beg off of people to get his work done.
Wolfli’s work was often characterized as “schizophrenic art” with obsessive symmetry, ornamental patterns, reduced depth. Every piece of the paper is covered, leaving no white or empty space. Another similar work is by the psychiatric patient Friederich Schroder, who drew the “Swan Doll’s Dance of Death.” With a perfect mirror symmetry down the middle, the drawing shows a monster with a grotesque smile wearing a crown and holding his arms curving downward with birds’ heads for hands, combining animal with man.
Naive and Primitive Artists
Dubuffet was working with the mentally ill artists, while “Outsider Art” outside of France was known to be a much more general term. It included not just the psychotic art, but also naive, self-taught, and primitive art as well. On the American scene in the early to mid twentieth century we had Grandma Moses, the renowned folk artist painting such countryside favorites as “This Old Checkered House in Winter” which was the subject of many paintings, one of which was appraised on “Antiques Roadshow” in 2004 for $60,000. Several of her paintings have appeared on Hallmark holiday cards.
Earlier we have Horace Pippin, born in my local area in West Chester in 1888, who painted “Giving Thanks” and “Domino Players.” Even earlier in France, there was Henri Rousseau, with his dream-like representations of jungles and jungle animals.
All of these artists could have been considered Naive painters because they were self-taught and their paintings possessed a child-like quality to them. This doesn’t mean all Naive painters had no formal education, but as it relates to Outsider Art it generally does. In modern times there is no stigma attached to this genre of art.
Children’s Art
I talked about how children learn art in my post Learning Art. The way we learn as we grow up and experiment with art starts out with an expression close to ancient societies’ art. For example, in ancient Egyptian wall paintings you will find people in a row side by side with no overlap. Children would express the same type of thing when they draw people in a crowd next to each other in a row instead of showing any signs of overlap. The way they see it, if someone’s arm looks as if it disappears into the back of another person, this makes no visual sense. You wouldn’t really see a person’s arm actually going inside someone else, so why would one draw it that way.
The same is true for people in buildings. When a child draws a person inside a building, they wouldn’t show a face looking out from a window, because this would mean there is simply a floating head in a window sill. If anything their art was more true to reality, than to aesthetics and perspective.
One funny recent story which raises the question of the authority of art dealers is a woman selling her son’s scribble paintings as priceless works of modern art. She didn’t tell the dealers her son was 6 or 7 years old and the paintings were more or less doodles. Nonetheless the dealers saw the “genius” of them and bought them top dollar.
If anything is to be learned from children and from child-like naive paintings is that art can be appreciated for art’s sake. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it certainly does not need the approval of avant garde art experts. Art can be found in the small crafts of Christmas Kitsche statues, the scribbles of prisoners and psychiatric patients and even the finger paintings of gorillas. Art should be appreciated for what it is, and what’s its attempting to be.
Whether it’s good art, bad art, crummy art, children’s art, “Outsider Art” is still art.
A while back I stumbled upon a website with a 16 question quiz entitled “Art or crap.” This funny little quiz shows 16 images which you must decide are either, well, the title pretty much explains that. You are scored as you go and beware, you may feel a little foolish. In fact the exercise seems to add to the argument that much of modern art really is foolish and requires very little skill, to say the least. A blue canvas is only a blue canvas whether it is on a museum wall or not. While they may call it priceless, I may say it isn’t even worth the price of the materials.
Kitsch Art
But is one person’s trash another’s treasure? I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You must ask yourself what you, as an observer, consider art to be. Can you stare into a blank canvas and see beauty? Is this what the artist intended, did the artist intend for you to do anything?
We must think of extremes here. Does a few crayon scribbles on a canvas splattered with paint rate the same respect as a well thought out painting which took years to make? Obviously not, but I suppose its all about the artists intentions.
We must not forget “Art” can be a pretty broad term. Not everything can be lumped into one giant group. Consider the little Christmas statues that somebody designed and are mass produced, or the statues of religious icons sold commercially. It takes some skill in coming up with these little trinkets and sometimes people have to paint them by hand. Examples such as these can be labeled as “kitsch.” Here the term applies to commercially produced items, which in reference to the art world can be considered lower quality. The basic formula is the repetition used to mass produce.
This unfortunate label can be attached to artists who have basically saturated the market with a basic model for their work. Artists such as Thomas Kinkade have used and abused their style to the point where the value lessens which each new addition. He has copied his own style time and again, failing to come up with anything new and has become too commercial.
Another aspect of kitsch art can be a subject of some controversy. This is the idea that artwork can carry the stigma of kitsch if it has become too pretentious to the point where it seems to try too hard. The photo-realism of William Adolphe Bouguereau leaves no mystery about its subjects and almost insults the intelligence of the viewer by making every grain of sand visible. It’s a shame so many believe this, because his paintings obviously took a tremendous amount of skill.
You have these little crafts you can get at a Christmas Bazaar and anything you can buy that is mass-produced, whether its hand-painted or not. Kitsch can be anything considered to be tasteless or inferior. These items are on the low end of the totem pole.
If you wanted to put levels to art you may say that such kitsch artists and commercially driven producers would be at the bottom. Next you may find graphic artists, then illustrators, animators, and then fine artists with the exact order being debatable. These ideals seem to have been the norm in the art world. And speaking of the norm and the status quo, what if you wanted to break away from all that?
The Dada Movement
Here we have a movement based on defying conventionalism and values. Pioneers such as Marcel Duchamp (see one of his readymades at the top, and his “Mona Lisa With a Moustache” below) strove to break free from the art world and produce their own chaotic “anti-art.”
The funny thing about rebellious anti-art movements is that they always end up getting assimilated into the system. The Dadaists did not consider their works to be art, but of course its all considered art today. Some say this was the prelude to abstract expressionism.
Marcel Duchamp was also famous for taking a urinal, writing the fictional name R. Mutt on the side of it, calling it “Fountain,” and putting it in a museum. It was this type of “found art” that made him noteworthy, and his practices would certainly be emulated. A point of interest here is that he was a trailblazer and the first to do this type of thing. Anybody who takes a wheel and screws it into a stool these days is not an artist and their work is, well, kitschy.
Minimalism
Dadaism as a movement did not last very long and after several years came big movements such as surrealism with Rene Magritte and his mysteries. Magritte would paint a picture of a pipe and write underneath it “This is not a pipe.” It didn’t matter to him whether or not people understood his pictures. Perhaps he was making a statement on art in general.
Eventually came abstract expressionism with its emotionally charged realism-defying principles. Artwork didn’t have to be about any specific subject at all. It had to do with expressing yourself with basic human feeling. So instead of painting a landscape of a city, one might draw a few lines and splatter a whole bunch of paint on it.
Minimalism can be considered a reaction to this. If art is going toward the direction of leaving actual representative form behind, we may as well predict where art can lead us. Throughout art history of the 19th and 20th centuries you had a pattern of subtraction as far as visual arts went. Why not just skip ahead and make art nothing.
And that is what the minimalists seemed to do. If a number be assigned to their art it was certainly zero. Art in its most primitive form is essentially nothing, a blank canvas, a black square. In contrast to the abstract expressionists, the minimalists did not consider their art to be expression at all. It simply was what it was: plain cold geometric forms. A blue canvas was simply a blue canvas.
Art of the Future
While the minimalists certainly had a strong message, it is impossible to predict the art of the future. Is the art world patterned with endless subtraction? After a blank canvas is there anything left to subtract?
Art is much more complex than this, of course, and there are all kinds of schools of thought on the subject. All I can say is art is what you make of it. If you want it to be art, it is what you think it is. If you are an art dealer and some crazy artist is charging a million dollars for a pile of junk and you want to put it in a museum, more power to you.
Perhaps art gets bored with itself and the art market must constantly change. As with anything there are fads and fashions and whats hip today is forgotten tomorrow. As artists I think we can follow Warhol’s prediction that in the future everybody has fifteen minutes of fame.
So be optimistic. Paint, sculpt, splatter, tear, create, destroy and call it “priceless” while you’re at it.
You are reading a daily art blog with topics ranging from art, art history, painting, sculpture, drawing, illustration, animation, artists, galleries, museums, and plenty more. It is authored by Dan Kretschmer, who lives around Philadelphia. Dan Kretschmer is also the author of a book called "Masters of the Renaissance," which takes a look at 18 of the most important artists of the Renaissance in Europe.
The purpose of this art blog is to raise general awareness of art and to share knowledge and interests. The author's goal is to spark interest in as many people as possible, and to inspire them to pursue art to enrich their lives.
