Pop Art

Andy Warhol, 200 Campbell Soup Cans, acrylic on canvas, 1962

Andy Warhol

• Like almost all of Warhol’s work after the 1962 Campbell’s Soup Cans, Mona Lisa of 1963 uses a photo-silkscreen process, eliminating the artist’s direct touch of paint brush to canvas and substituting instead a process which purports to be objective, detached, neutral. But the work actually aggressively asserts the means of its creation, the uneven inking and awkward registration being intentionally visible, and the half-tone dots of photo-mechanical reproduction being clearly shown – characteristics typical in Warhol’s works. Further the colors used – black, magenta, yellow, and cyan-blue – are those which the printer uses in four-color printing, and the arrangement of the Mona Lisa images on the canvas intentionally mimics that which might result on a waste sheet of paper used in testing a printed image.

• The subject of Warhol’s Mona Lisa then, is not Leonardo's painting, but rather its reproduction and the way in which our perception of a unique creation is affected by ubiquitous (existing or being everywhere at the same time) duplication. The related canvas Thirty Are Better Than One, with thirty Mona Lisa images, brazenly asserts they typically American notion that more is better.

• Warhol’s Disaster paintings – including images of the electric chair, atomic explosions, horrifying car crashes, race riots, and Jacqueline Kennedy at her husband’s funeral – are not intended as social commentary on the issues of capital punishment, nuclear war, or civil rights, but rather on the way in which our understanding of something as extreme as violent death is manipulated by constant repetition and by the anesthetizing screen of halftone dots in media images.

Andy Warhol's Little Electric Chair, 1965

Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs:Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America

This exhibition presented Warhol's Electric Chair series of paintings and prints together with diverse audio and written points of view as a catalyst to generate dialogue around the various sides of the capital punishment debate. Presented in collaboration with Amnesty International USA's Human Rights Education Program and Mid-Atlantic Regional Office (MARO), the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Duquesne University School of Law, The Center for Victims of Violent Crime and The Public Conversations Project. The museum gratefully acknowledges these organizations, the Electric Chair community advisory committee and all the individuals who have given their time to the project. Supported in part by The Animating Democracy Initiative, a project of Americans for the Arts, funded by The Ford Foundation.

http://www.warhol.org/education/electric_chair.html

Warhol; section of Atomic Bomb 1965

Andy Warhol’s work was based on photography. He created silk screens of the photographic images and repeated them multiple times for effect. Many critics argued that this was not art. However, Andy Warhol changed how we view art by using photography to reflect back to the American public imagery that defined the culture of the time.