Pop Art

Eduardo Paolozzi was a Scottish artist, designer and sculptor of Italian descent, whose work covers a wide variety of areas of fine art, from large-scale sculptures to the design of fabrics and wallpapers. As an innovative artist, Paolozzi always looked for something fresh, yet unknown in the art. Due to his insatiable thirst for change and constant experiments, his work is heterogeneous and resembles a colourful mosaic, consisting of different styles, motifs, genres and art movements.

An innovative American artist, designer, publisher, filmmaker, producer, writer and collector. Andy Warhol, the founder of the homo universale ideology, was an outstanding personality in contemporary world art in general and the history of pop art in particular. He also entered the history of art as the creator of "commercial pop art".

One of the main artists of American pop art, known for images of stylized female nudes, which were the central theme and subject of close attention of the painter. Drawing inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, especially works of Willem de Kooning, the artist rethought the images and created his unique style, incredibly realistic, alluring and at the same time cold and detached, not affecting the deep feelings of the viewer.

One of the first and most prominent representatives of Pop Art, which gained wide popularity in the USA in the 1950s and 60s of the 20th century. Roy Lichtenstein became famous for his comic book paintings, each of which reflects various aspects of the life of ordinary Americans. Using simple and understandable images, the artist challenged avant-garde painting, intelligible only to a few, and turned everyday things into real works of art.

Robert Rauschenberg is an innovative artist, one of the most influential American masters of the second half of the 20th century, who gave impetus to the development of Pop art and Conceptual art. Throughout his long career, he experimented with almost all available forms of art, acting as an engraver, designer, sculptor, photographer and even avant-garde musician.

An English artist, one of the founders of the British pop art style. Peter Blake began his career in the post-war period, and the primary goal of his art was to help fellow citizens forget the horrors of war and plunge into a bright and, if possible, carefree, peaceful life.

Американский скульптор шведского происхождения, выдающийся представитель поп-арта. Клас Тур Олденбург начал свою карьеру в Нью-Йорке, где он участвовал в многочисленных хэппенингах и перформансах с такими художниками, как Джим Дайн, Аллан Капроу и Джордж Сигал. Он стал неотъемлемой частью движения поп-арт в начале 1960-ых годов, противопоставляя свои простые и привычные для восприятия работы сложной эстетике абстрактного экспрессионизма. Выставив в витрине «ненастоящего» магазина «ненастоящие» вещи, созданные из самых неожиданных материалов, художник по-настоящему удивил публику и мгновенно приобрел широкую известность.

American artist, sculptor and designer Keith Haring was mostly known for his graffiti paintings attracting with their rhythm, sincere and actual style.

A modern American artist and sculptor. Lives and works with his wife, artist Charlene von Hale, in New York, as well as in Martha, Texas. The art of Christopher Wool includes art movements related to pop art, abstraction, and post-conceptual concepts.

David Hockney is a contemporary English and American artist, an author of famous paintings in the style of pop art with images of sparkling blue pools, attracting the viewer with their coolness in the middle of a hot afternoon. His paintings, smooth and shiny like magazine pages, mesmerize you by their simplicity, clarity and plenty of sunlight.After moving from England to California, the artist became interested in photography. The original technique of shooting with the subsequent overlay of frames allows Hockney to create unusual collages that no one had done before him - these are half-photographs, half-paintings.A constant admirer of Cubism, the artist creates works with a renewed perspective, combining several images into a single whole. His innovative approach to the collage method made the artist a recognized master of photography at the end of the 20th century.Being one of the most influential and expensive artists of our time, David Hockney is constantly inventing new techniques and experimenting with various styles. Since 2009, the artist has surprised the public with computer paintings created using an application on a regular tablet. Hockney’s work, like his bright personality, is of constant interest in society, which expects discoveries and bold challenges from the ageless artist.

A German artist, one of the most famous and expensive contemporary painters. Gerhard Richter showed his talent in several styles of fine art. His photorealistic portraits with blurry contours are exhibited at the most famous museums in the world, and abstract canvases are sold at auctions for a lot of money.Starting his career in East Germany, the artist worked in a realistic style; however, having become acquainted with the works of contemporary artists Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, he sharply changed his painting towards avant-garde art. A few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he fled to West Berlin, where he started to search for his place in art. Based on photographs and products of popular culture, Richter created a vivid style, which included both realistic and completely abstract expression.In addition to painting, Gerhard Richter is known as the author of several major design projects. In 2007, he created the famous "Pixel Stained Glass" in Cologne Cathedral, which got the most controversial reviews. Instead of traditional biblical scenes, the artist created an impressive mosaic of multi-coloured glass, which consists of 11 thousand 250 coloured squares of eighty shades. It is interesting that the artist performed the work as a gift to the cathedral, without taking a dime for his painstaking labour.

An American sculptor and designer of Japanese descent. Isamu Noguchi was one of the most prominent and famous sculptors of the twentieth century in the United States. Throughout his life, he was engaged in art experiments, created original sculptures, design of furniture and ceramics, architectural and landscape projects. His extraordinary and bold style combined traditional and avant-garde elements, setting a new standard for contemporary art.Noguchi did not lose touch with his historical homeland and spent a lot of time in Japan, opened a studio there. The artist regularly traveled around the world. The harmony of Japanese gardens and ceramics, the subtlety and grace of Chinese calligraphy, the gracefulness of Italian marble sculptures, the monumentality and brilliant simplicity of the art of the Indians of ancient America were reflected in his work.The sculptor's work was widely appreciated in the United States in 1938 after he created a large sculpture symbolizing freedom of the press for the Associated Press building in New York. This work was the first of many public facilities installed in various cities around the world. The works of Isamu Noguchi, from children's playgrounds, city squares and squares to complete garden complexes, reflects his faith in the social significance of sculpture, which makes art accessible to everyone.

James Rosenquist was an American artist, the central figure of pop art, famous for his huge collage paintings depicting popular objects of American culture. He was one of the first to include advertising images in his works. Consumer goods, well-known personalities and trademarks were permanent attributes of the artist's painting - he boldly combined all of them in his works of impressive size and bright colours.In his youth, James Rosenquist worked at an advertising agency and created the design of large billboards, which helped him develop his original style and recognizable style. For a modern viewer used to the fact that anything can be on the picture, it is not surprising that the canvas shows spaghetti in sauce or a bottle of Coca-Cola next to the portrait of the president. However, for the society of the 1960s, this was a real discovery and even a shock; therefore, the artist's works attracted the close attention of the public. One of them, called “F-111”, became truly iconic, “new Guernica”, which very accurately depicted American reality with growing consumer demand and frightening military power.The art of James Rosenquist was popular almost from the very beginning of his career. Using his influence, he stood up to protect his colleagues and helped achieve recognition of the rights of artists at the federal level, after which he was appointed to the National Council for the Arts of the United States. For six decades, Rosenquist created large-scale provocative paintings that rose economic, political, environmental and scientific problems, the relevance of which did not decline over time.

An American artist and sculptor, a significant figure of modern painting and sculpture, one of the most commercially successful artists of the 20th century. Jasper Johns expressed the idea that art can be understood and close to each person, and not just for particular connoisseurs.Having abandoned the principles of Abstract Expressionism, misty and distant from people, he used generally known things, symbols of a certain phenomenon, ideas or just everyday habits in his paintings. His most famous picture of this style is “The American flag” – a recognizable and familiar to everyone national symbol, which the artist turned into a colourful painting.The name of Jasper Johns is often remembered together with another painter, his close friend and colleague Robert Rauschenberg. After Johns met him, his style significantly changed, and his ideas were realized in original and truly innovative works.The artist’s use of simple objects, for example, beer cans, which he made as a work of art, makes his work related to a conceptual approach to fine art. With his creations, the artist deliberately violated the boundaries between art and everyday life; this marked the beginning of the pop art movement that was extremely popular in the USA in the second half of the 20th century.The artist currently lives in Connecticut and is considered the most expensive of the living painters.

An American artist, a representative of Cubism and pop art in painting. Stuart Davis is an icon of contemporary art, whose work combines European art tradition with a truly American culture and lifestyle.Stuart's father was an art editor of the art department of “Philadelphia Press” and worked closely with many famous artists, including John Sloane, George Lax and Robert Henry. The artist's mother was a talented sculptor, and the boy was close to the world of art from childhood.The artist is considered the founder of modernist painting in the United States, in particular, the style of pop art, which has become a phenomenal world discovery. Being the head of the Union of Artists and the national chairman of the Congress of American Artists, Davis always advocated the accessibility of art to the broad masses and tried to influence the country's socio-political environment through his creativity. For active work and outstanding achievements in the visual arts, the artist was twice awarded the International Guggenheim Prize in 1958 and in 1960. The works of Stuart Davis made a revolution in American painting, making it public and understandable for everyone, and highlighting the unique nature of the nation.The work of Stuart Davis is a unique phenomenon not only in American but also in the world painting. Pictures of this amazing and very bright artist represent a mosaic of images, symbols and colors familiar to everyone and directly affecting the emotions of the viewer.Many of the representatives of Abstract expressionism and Abstract surrealism considered themselves the followers of Davis.

A large bronze sculpture adorns one of the parks of the capital of Great Britain. It consists of abstract and figurative parts, as well as recognizable mechanical parts of industrial production combined into one composition on a low stone pedestal.

Eduardo Paolozzi completed his sculptural Isaac Newton for installation in front of the new British Library. The sculptor borrowed the scientist’s figure from the colour lithography of Symbolist artist William Blake, in which Newton is depicted with a measuring device in his hand.

The artist once noticed the plaster head of David Michelangelo in the shop window, where it was placed on a wooden chest of drawers. This strange combination inspired Eduardo Paolozzi, and he created a copy of this cast, cut it into several parts, between which he placed wooden inserts.

One of the most famous and largest projects by Eduardo Paolozzi is a mosaic at one of the London Underground stations. Having received an order for the design of a room the size of which was a thousand square meters, the artist pondered for a long time on how to make the image understandable to people who look at it while moving.

In the 1960s, Eduardo Paolozzi was interested in the technology of screen printing, which was actively used by American Pop art artists. He created a series of works in this technique; one of them named “The Silk World of Michelangelo” tells about the relationship between history and modernity, as well as between high art and modern advertising.

The work is included in a cycle of 12 works entitled “As Is When” made using the silk-screen printing technique. The painting is dedicated to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and consists of a set of bright details, of which two human figures in the middle of the composition with interiors in the form of mechanical elements attract the most attention.

Eduardo Paolozzi began to create his early collages under the influence of the works of Cubists and Dadaists, who were the first to use this method in their paintings in the first third of the 20th century. The artist composed “Real Gold” and several other similar works from parts of American newspapers and magazines that were left to him by soldiers temporarily staying in Paris.

The work by Eduardo Paolozzi made in the collage technique, slightly smaller than a sheet for a typewriter, was the first work in the style of Pop art that had not emerged by that time yet. From childhood, the artist was fond of American culture; in his collages, he tried to convey the attractiveness of a calm and well-fed life overseas that was so different from the ruined and poor post-war Europe.

One of the last works of Warhol, where the master switched from closely “viewing” and replicating celebrities of his time to world-famous politicians.

Many art connoisseurs and critics agree that Warhol's most successful artworks were self-portraits. In this late work, the author focused on the head and the wig (it is known that Andy, who had become bald early, wore wigs for many years).

This work in the silk-screen printing technique was included in the cycle “Endangered Species” (the name for the cycle “Animals in Make-up” is also found). The series, ten species of rare animals whose existence is under threat, was ordered by the gallery owners, famous animal defenders R. and F. Feldman. Grevy’s zebra that disappeared from some habitats is the rarest subspecies of the zebra family.

The series was created as the artist’s reaction to the visit of President Nixon to China. Warhol used a black and white image of Mao from a famous communist publication and painted hundreds of portraits of the totalitarian ruler of various sizes.

Among the works of Warhol, who rarely went beyond the context of American culture, there are four colourful portraits of Queen Elizabeth II. They were made based on official photographs taken during the celebration of the silver jubilee of the august person of the United Kingdom.

Warhol took an image for this work from the movie “Flaming Star” (1960). One of the paintings with the image of Elvis was first shown at the second solo exhibition of Warhol at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963.

This is a work from the Death and Disaster series in which Warhol used images from daily newspapers. The author applied the photo-silk-screening method to duplicate the plot on the canvas. The repetitions of the image, its fragmentation and distortion are essential to create a strong effect - the artist wanted to shock the viewer.

The sudden death of superstar Monroe from an overdose of sleeping pills excited many. Warhol, passionate about pop culture, used a photograph of the actress from the movie Niagara (1953) for this work.

By the 1960s, the New York art world was filled with works in the style of abstract expressionism. Warhol became one of the artists who felt the need to return images to the visual arts. Interior designer and gallery owner M. Latow proposed him the idea of ​​depicting objects that people use every day.

The artist’s early works are characterized by a combination of neo-primitivism, expressionism and neo-dadaism. In this work, conditional and multi-scale figures (six of them) are placed in space arbitrarily.

Made in bright colours and a simplistic manner with large colour planes typical of the artist, the composition depicts two naked women. In this work, Tom Wesselmann paid tribute to the legacy of great Henri Matisse, quoting one of Matisse’s works and adding recognizable features of his creative manner to it.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tom Wesselmann created a series of paintings, in which he depicted a nude model against a background of famous works of art. In addition to paintings by Piet Mondrian, who was one of the artist’s idols, he used paintings by R. Lichtenstein, E. Warhol and H. Matisse, paying tribute to these masters.

Although Tom Wesselmann insisted on the complete voidness of his work, the picture from the series “Bedrooms” depicting the face of a girl against the backdrop of a home interior evokes certain feelings. Bright makeup and naked breasts of the young woman look attractive, and her closed eyes indicate relaxation and enjoyment.

In the works of Tom Wesselmann of the 1980s, you can often find interesting compositions that consist of several separate canvases of an unusual shape. Usually, those are all the same objects that the author loved: smoking cigarettes, women's lips and breasts, meal and small household items, like lipstick or sunglasses.

The work belongs to the series of works “Drop Out”, which Tom Wesselmann created under the impression of his vacation on the sea coast. The special atmosphere of the sun-drenched beach and the relaxation of sunbathing bodies are reliably conveyed in this picture.

During his career, Tom Wesselmann created many images of a huge mouth with bright red puffy lips. This image has become a recognizable visiting card of the artist, a kind of symbol that is an integral part of popular culture and periodically appears in various interpretations.

This work from the famous Great American Nude series demonstrates all the main features of Tom Wesselmann's painting. The viewer can see an attractive lying girl, whose bright lips are the only visible part of her face, seductive nipples on her bare chest and shiny yellow hair.

Despite the fact that Tom Wesselmann denied that he was a representative of Pop art, this picture is an excellent example of this style. The still life depicts goods typical of America in the mid-20th century: white bread, a bottle of Coke, a can of stew, lemons and a pack of cigarettes.

The work is a collage of real objects and two-dimensional pictorial images. In the left part of the work, the artist placed a kitchen cabinet that can be opened and closed, as well as a part of a real sink above which an electric light is ignited.

Great American Nude is Tom Wesselmann's largest and most famous series of works. Here, he depicted a naked man lying on a bed in a room where a portrait of the president and a drawing of the American flag hanging on the wall.

The nude works created in the 1990s were combined by the author in the Late Nudes series. In these paintings, Lichtenstein returned to the figures from the comic and works in a similar but somewhat modified technique.

A few decades after the creation of his outrageous “comic” paintings, Roy Lichtenstein was able to shock the public again by creating a series of works repeating the paintings of the great artists of modernism.

Creating his works, Lichtenstein wanted them to look as if they were printed. To do this, he used the methods of raster printing, in which large areas are filled not with a solid colour but with the help of small dots.

Having rather limited artistic means at his disposal, Roy Lichtenstein could convey the emotions and atmosphere of the moment to the viewer. The faces of a man and a woman, shown in close-up, resemble a photograph painted in bright colours or a poster.

This scene from the comic is depicted by the author in his manner using bold black contours and only three colours: yellow, blue and red. Lichtenstein transmitted the speed with which the car was traveling using dashed lines parallel to the plane of the canvas.

One of Lichtenstein's most famous paintings is a diptych depicting aerial combat. During the Second World War, the artist served in Europe, and what he saw during the war formed the basis of the plot of the picture.

To create the composition, the artist used a scene from a comic strip, as he did in his other works. Lichtenstein did not completely redraw the plot from the magazine but cut the image in half.

Sometimes instead of beauties and couples in love from comics, inanimate objects appear as the central character in the paintings by Roy Lichtenstein. Most often, these are various “smart” machines - housekeepers, which are not only convenient but also prestigious house items.

The work was created under the influence of the famous "Black Square" by Malevich. The canvas created in a comic book technique, which Lichtenstein had already been actively using that time, depicts a man looking into a dark room through a peephole.

The first work of Roy Lichtenstein from a series of paintings based on comics. The idea to create a work in this style came to the artist spontaneously when his little son asked him to paint a picture from his favorite Mickey Mouse comic strip.

The theme of space travel, which was extremely popular in the 1960s, often appears in the works of Robert Rauschenberg. In July 1969, NASA leadership invited the artist to their base, so that he would photograph the launch of the Apollo 11 ship.

The full-size lithography consists of six x-rays against the background of dimmer images of several random objects and drawings. These are photographs of Robert Rauschenberg himself, so the artist considered the picture a self-portrait or "self-portrait of an inner man".

Andy Warhol introduced Robert Rauschenberg to the silk-screen printing technique in which this work was made. The artist liked this method of creating paintings, and he performed a series of works using this printing method.

The figure of John F. Kennedy often appears in the works of Robert Rauschenberg related to the 1960s. The artist was a big fan of this politician, and the murder of the president shocked him very much, forcing him to return to this image again and again.

The first installation of Robert Rauschenberg from the Comines series created from various household items combined with traditional materials. The work is on the verge of collage, painting and sculpture and has the form of an ordinary bed.

Это произведение Роберт Раушенберг выполнил совместно со своим другом и творческим партнером  Джоном Кейджем. Для того чтоб создать его, Раушенберг попросил друга проехать на его машине по 23 листам бумаги для принтера, склеенным в одну длинную полосу.

At the beginning of his creative career, Robert Rauschenberg sought to expand the boundaries of art and destroy the stereotypes that reigned in it. The “victim” of these goals was a pencil drawing by famous Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, which the artist erased, so that only barely visible marks of the pencil remained on paper.

Initially, the “White Pictures” by Robert Rauschenberg was perceived by many as outright mockery. The absence of a trace of any intervention by the artist on an almost pure white surface puzzles the viewer and suggests that this may be some kind of rally. In fact, the artist managed to express a lot with the help of his white canvases.

This is the author’s amusing fantasy about a meeting between the popular pop group Spice Girls and the Rock and Roll King Elvis Presley - idols of different generations and different countries. The famous musician poses in front of the cameras, enjoying the company of pretty half-naked girls.

The work depicts a meeting of three famous British artists: David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Peter Blake himself. It was created after these three avant-garde painters met in 1979 in Los Angeles.

The heroes of the work - an owl and a cat traveling by a toy boat - resemble soft plush toys that children like to sleep with. These characters in the painting by Peter Blake symbolize a childhood that quickly ends and leaves vivid or disturbing memories.

Peter Blake's most famous work, reflecting the mood and psychedelic culture of the 1960s. Blake worked on the collage together with American artist Jenn Haworth, whom he had married shortly before.

The artist made the portrait of his longtime friend and colleague David Hockney, who by that time was a popular figure in the art world, of photographs. The picture was taken by famous photographer Michael Cooper - he photographed the fair-haired artist in his recognizable glasses with a massive horn-rimmed frame.

This collage was made in a bright decorative style. The entire canvas is divided into identical squares, in each of which the artist placed various images.

Here, the artist depicted himself standing in the garden at full height, in jeans clothes and with a lot of badges on his jacket. The work contains several details indicating Peter Blake's fascination with American culture.

Pop art, which first appeared in England, very quickly gained fans overseas - in the United States of America. The most prominent representatives of this "folk art", such as Jasper Jones and Robert Rauschenberg, used not only photographs and clippings from magazines but also everyday objects, making them works of art.

“On the Balcony” is an iconic painting by the artist, which became one of the first works in the style of pop art. The characters of the picture, looking like teenagers, are surrounded by images of many balconies, which attentive viewers, if not too lazy, can count – they are total 32.

Since student days, Peter Blake has been interested in the theme of childhood and often painted children. One of his early works, “Children Reading Comics”, was based on a child’s photo of the artist, in which the author himself, as a teenager, reads the popular Eagle magazine with his sister Shirley.

Unlike the relatively neutral works of Claes Oldenburg in the style of pop art, this item from a set of cosmetics carries a definite anti-war appeal.

The artist's early works were created under the influence of the famous "finished things" by Marcel Duchamp and the aesthetics of Pop art. The most ordinary objects that a person sees and uses most often every day became an object of his art.

Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: private collection.

Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain.

Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: the National Art Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Mediums: acrylic, canvas. Location: the Tate Gallery Britain, London, the UK.

The Scarsedt Gallery, New York (the USA).

Mediums: oil on canvas, wooden shelf, objects found. Location: private collection.

Mediums: oil, acrylic, canvas. Location: the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (the USA).

Mediums: oil and acrylic on canvas with electric light and wood table. Location: the Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut (the USA).

Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (the USA).

Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the USA).

Материалы: масло, холст. Местонахождение: находится в Музее Людвига, Кельн (Германия).

Mediums: oil, canvas, aluminized Mylar. Location: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (the USA).

Mediums: oil, canvas, enamel. Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the USA).

Mediums: рanels, canvas, oil, aluminum coating. Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the USA).

Mediums: oil, fiberboard. Location: The Center Georges Pompidou, Paris (France).

Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: The Museum of Modern Art Stockholm (Sweden).

Location: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.