Pop Art

Pop Art is perhaps one of the most significant art movements of the twentieth century. It began in _______________________ in 1952 with a group of young avant-garde artists that called themselves the Independent Group. They wanted to challenge the art world, and they were interested in the relationship between popular culture and the visual arts. Inspired by graphic images from American advertising, comic strips, and magazines, the group wanted to create art that was inclusive and which had mass appeal.

London

The New York artist _______________________ was part of the early American Pop Art movement. Like other Pop Artists at this time, he referenced and incorporated images from mass media into his artwork and was particularly inspired by comic books and cartoons.

Roy Lichtenstein

The Pop Artist known as Andy Warhol was born with the name Andrew Warhola in 1928 in _________________________to Slovakian immigrant parents who were devout Byzantine Catholics. He grew up during the Great Depression in a working-class neighborhood. He suffered from a neurological disorder that kept him at home throughout much of his childhood, where he spent time reading comics and Hollywood magazines and playing with paper cutouts. His poor health impacted his physical appearance, causing blotchy skin and hair loss.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

In 1949, after graduating from art school with a degree in pictorial design, Andy Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a(n) ____________________, and he dropped the final "a" in Warhola. His work first appeared in a 1949 issue of Glamour magazine, in which he illustrated a story called "What is Success?" An award-winning illustrator throughout the 1950s, some of his clients included Tiffany & Co., I. Miller Shoes, Fleming-Joffe, Bonwit Teller, Columbia Records, and Vogue.

commercial artist

Warhol's work is both a celebration and a critique of _______________________.

consumer culture

Later, he adopted a _____________________ technique to speed up this process. He created his well-known art studio known as The Factory where he worked with assistants, rolling out product after product, and displaying them in warehouse-like arrangements.

silk screening

Warhol's work charts the development of a culture obsessed with ________________________.

fame

One of the major themes of Warhol's work was ______________________, whether it be that of a product for sale in a store, a celebrity on the cover of a magazine, or his own personal image.

branding

____________________________ was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother. At an early age, he showed a precocious talent for drawing, and his mother enrolled him as a Junior Member of the Brooklyn Museum when he was six.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

In 1980 Jean-Michel Basquiat met _______________________, who was stunned by his "mystique and allure." Over the next several years, the two artists became close on a personal level and collaborated on a number of art projects, including the film called Downtown 81 (Links to an external site.), which featured music from Basquiat. Both artists would meet an untimely death before the end of the decade.

Andy Warhol

Common motifs in Jean-Michel Basquiat's work include text, skulls, crowns, and _______________.

the police

________________________________ is a Canadian artist who was born in 1961. He readily acknowledges the influence of the Pop art movement on his practice, stating: "Pop Art is a way of looking at the modern world and the consumer world and finding it compelling and beautiful instead of scary and freaky, which also be the case. Andy Warhol said that once you saw the world as Pop, you could never look at it the same way again, and he was right."

Douglas Coupland

Doug Coupland created ______________________ in 2014. He created a seven-foot sculpture of his own head. He placed it outside the Vancouver Art Gallery and encouraged the public to engage in his work by applying their own chewed gum on it. Coupland described the work as "eight pieces in one: a self-portrait, a still life, a landscape, social sculpture, performance art, conceptual art and time-based art. And it wants to be your friend."

Gumhead

The work of Douglas Coupland above reflects the emphasis on ______________ in Pop Art.

text

The image above comes from Douglas Coupland's series of works that make use of _______________. When scanned with a reader on a cell phone, the images reveal statements from the artist. Coupland said: "I began writing messages I would send to a person who died just before I was born, or to a person who will be born right after I die. How do you compress thoughts about life on earth into 250 ASCII characters? Ultimately they morphed into poems and pieties. They draw our attention to the past, the present and the future we may face."

QR codes

The emergence of the ____________________ movement began in the early 1990s, when a group of women in Olympia, Washington, held a meeting to discuss how to address sexism in the punk scene.

riot Grrrl

A ______________________ is most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published unique work of minority interest, usually reproduced via photocopier. A popular definition includes that circulation must be 5,000 or less, although in practice the significant majority are produced in editions of less than 1,000. Profit is not the primary intent of publication. There are so many types of zines: art and photography, literary, social and political, music, perzines (personal), travel, health, food. And the list goes on and on.

zine

The phrase, "the medium is the message" is a phrase coined by the 20th century Canadian philosopher, _________________________.

Marshall McLuhan

Pop Art explores the intersection of art and popular culture and the various ways that humans engage with media and technology in contemporary culture. These artists reflect the work of 20th century philosopher, Marshall McLuan who coined the well-known phrase,_______________________.

the medium is the message