April 16, 2004
Pop Art is still silly.
In case anyone was wondering whether Pop Art looks any better after 30-40 years, let me answer: no. I went to the SFMOMA Pop Art retrospective today and found the usual suspects. There were some good paintings in the bunch, but one could easily argue that they are fundamentally different than the main body of Pop Art.
So, first the good:
Thiebaud. They were displaying about five Thiebauds, all of them excellent. I continue to find his paint handling, his composition, his use of color as exciting as ever. Two of the works were from the early 60's, and showed vestiges of his earlier abstract period (in terms of paint handling, not in terms of subject matter). I do prefer Thiebaud's more recent paintings (from the 1980's on), but these pastries and gumball machines are still fantastic.
Is Thiebaud a Pop Artist? Well, no. He paints landscapes, still lifes and portraits. The fact that his still life subjects are found in daily life is not a remarkable trait. All still life subjects (or at least most) tend to be of objects found in daily life. Why tag it as Pop Art simply because the daily life depicted is in the late 20th century?
Robert Arneson. Arneson, like Thiebaud, depicts daily objects, but with a humor that is not as apparent in Thiebaud's work. Calling him a Pop Artist almost works in terms of calling Oldenberg a Pop Artist, but there is something fundamentally different in how they approach the objects they are depicting. Oldenberg's use of monumental size might be seen as ironic (a term that is horridly overused), but Arneson is using the objects to provide form for his own peculiar visions of the world. So a closer comparison (not stylisticly however) would be to Picasso. Was Picasso a Pop Artist when he used his leftover sole bones in a ceramic work? Of course not, and neither is Arneson a Pop Artist because he made a ceramic sculptural fantasy on a typewriter.
Ed Kienholtz. I am bugged by this artist simply because his name is too close to mine. If you have an oddball last name, you should at least have the consolation of not having other folks in the field with a similar sounding name. OK, he was first, but so what? I do like his work a lot. Is it Pop? Maybe. But then again, what is Pop Art anyway?
If we have to peg it as a movement, then it must be scene through the eyes of Andy Worhol, and I hate seeing anything through his eyes. Yuck. But more on him later.
Mel Ramos. Another Sacramentan. Since he paints things like superheroes and supermodels, he might actually deserve the tag Pop Art, for what it is worth. His paint handling and compositional sense set him light years ahead of Warhol, though.
Now the Bad:
Warhol. Yawn. His work was never interesting. If we are to denigrate the genre of still life, then all of the criticisms of the genre belong in Warhol's lap (notice that the main purveyors of schlock art ALL have lots of Warhol prints, along with that Neiman or Neumann or whatever the horrid Sports Illustrated painter's name is). However, the less said about this most overrated artist the better. They had Brillo boxes and soup cans and Liz Taylor and all the other crap there.
Lichtenstein. More boring formula from a man with a mildly interesting idea carried way too far.
I will see the show for a second time (hopefully with Amalia asleep so that I can take a longer look) and will post a more thorough review then.
Posted by erik at April 16, 2004 11:43 PM | TrackBackI think the reason you dislike Pop Art so much is that it basically focuses on the ideas of reproduction and copying. It is mass produced therefore it can make a lot of money. Comparing other types of art to pop art is a bit like comparing a hand written letter to one that is typed. Pop Art was a bit like the industrial revolution in art, I guess we lost a lot of the craft and emotion but gained precision and style. I am also doing A-levle art and photography.
Posted by: at October 10, 2007 10:11 AMOkay, first of all lucy, good on ya! although i agree that warhol is hugely over-rated i find his work fasinating.
Although i admire Arneson i have to disagree with your description and comparisum to Picasso, who is so overated i can't believe it; in my opinion, he was a good artist, his art (often) ment something, but i seriously cant see why people ADORE him! but i must say, Arneson's typewriter has reminds me of my own work, and style. which is more like Oldenburg, but i wont get into it!
it was nice to notice that you had more good to say about pop art rather than the bad!
... i dont know wat that lucy chick is on about.. i study art as well and am unfortunatly studing pop art. Andy warhol is a poor excuse of an artist in my opinion. to produce over 2000 works in 2 yrs shows that he put almost no real thought into his works. he just wanted the money that his popularity at the time was easily giving him! lyk he didnt even produce the majority of works his assistants did, and recieved lyk 0 credit for doing so.
Posted by: taz at May 8, 2005 11:28 PMI would just like to say that, Erik, you obviously don't know talent when you see it...Warhol and lichtenstein are fantastic Pop artists and have inspired me no end to create my own pieces. I especially like andy Warhols Marilyn Monroe Portraits, they emphisize the Media Attention Marilyn went through, and still does go through even though she has sadly passed away. The repition shows how we see her face all the time in the media, on tv and in newspapers, in different ways and different sides of her. Lichtenstein wanted to take a commercial image, such as an american comic strip and make it a work of art so people would study it like they would anything else in a museum, not just look at it like it tells a story. To do this he made the pieces both Big and distant by making the pictures up of dots and bold lines, this makes you stand back and take a hard long look. The fact that you yawn at Andy Warhols and roy Lichtensteins work shows you have no respect for great artists and obviously don't understand what the artists are trying to put across to people.
I am currently taking an A level course in art and am carrying it on to collage after next year.
I think you need to learn a bit more about art before you start criticising Artists like Warhol and lichtenstein that have created works of art that have made loads of money and that have inspired so many people like me. I'd like to see you create something as meaningfull and inspiring as they have! it's not easy!
Thats all i have to say...so please learn something about these artists before you critise their hard work. You are intitled to your oppinion but i honestly think you have no idea what you are talking about.
Posted by: Lucy at July 24, 2004 6:43 AMSomeday I will undertake learning about art. I know almost nothing.
I do not have an innate sense of color and proportion--I can tell when a color scheme is nice, but I am powerless to put one together myself from scratch.
I'm visually challenged, and I've always been inimidated by art.
You have no idea what consolation it brings to hear that you, too, hate the work of LeRoy Neiman! (Why do I suspect that he was named "Leroy" at birth, but changed it to "LeRoy" when he started schlepping his wares at the Olympics?).
Some ignoramuses say, "I may not know art, but I know what I like!"
I tend rather to say, "I may not know art, but I know what I DON'T like!"
Glad that my instincts were right (at least) on Kincade and Neiman!
Posted by: KTC at April 18, 2004 11:22 AM