ELLICE: 1960's Pop Art

Pop art was one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. It was characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the clichéd and tasteless elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so.

Andy Warhol was one of the most important artists in the Pop art movement in America. Warhol became as famous as many of the celebrities he portrayed in his popular screen prints. Among his many popular quotes and comments he stated famously that "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

He painted iconic images like dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings. It was during the 1960s that he produced paintings of famous American products from the Campbell's Soup Cans (from the Campbell Soup Company) to Coca-Cola replicas. His work also included paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor. The aim of Andy Warhol art was to remove the difference between fine arts and the commercial arts used for magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums or advertising campaigns.

Warhol founded "The Factory", his own studio where he produced such work, and during these years he gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to make art of mass-produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own creative insight in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art - his work quickly became very controversial, and very popular.