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Quotes

"Buying is more American than thinking, and I'm as American as they come."

"Everybody has called Pop art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values seem more askew... I think the meaning of my work is that it's industrial, it's what all the world will soon become."

"Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop..."

"Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything."

"A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

"[Pop art is:] Popular (designed for a mass audience); transient (short-term solution); expendable (easily forgotten); low cost; mass produced; young (aimed at youth); witty; sexy; gimmicky; glamorous; and last but not least, Big Business."

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Quotes "Buying is more American than thinking, and I'm as American as they come." "Everybody has called Pop art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values seem more askew...

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Claes Oldenburg was the Pop Artist who gravitated towards sculpture more than any of his contemporaries. At the start of 1960's he was involved in various 'Happenings': spontaneous, improvised, artistic events where the experience of the participants was more important than an end product - a kind of consumer art encounter for a consumer culture.

Oldenburg found his inspiration in the imagery of consumer merchandise, "I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol Art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L & M art, Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art." In 1961 he opened 'the Store' where he sold plaster replicas of fast foodstuff and junk merchandise whose crudely painted surfaces were an obvious parody of Abstract Expressionism. He used the front shop of 'The Store' as a gallery while he replenished his stock from his studio in the back shop.

Oldenburg's work is full of humorous irony and contradiction: on one hand he makes hard objects like a bathroom sink out soft sagging vinyl, while on the other he makes soft objects like a cheeseburger out of hard painted plaster. He also subverts the relative size of objects by taking small items like a spoon and cherry and recreating them on an architectural scale. He said, "I like to take a subject and deprive it of its function completely." By undermining the form, scale and function of an object, Oldenburg contradicts its meaning and forces the spectator to reassess its presence. When you see his large scale public works in their environmental settings, they have a powerful surrealist quality like Gulliver at Brobdingnag.

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Claes Oldenburg was the Pop Artist who gravitated towards sculpture more than any of his contemporaries. At the start of 1960's he was involved in various 'Happenings': spontaneous, improvised, artistic events where the experience of the participants was more important than an end product - a kind of consumer art encounter for a consumer culture.

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pop art artists pop art paintings pop art

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Pop Art: List of artists and index to where their art can be viewed at art museums worldwide.

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Claes Oldenburg came to New York City from his hometown of Chicago in 1956, when he was twenty-seven years old. Initially aiming to make his mark as a painter, by 1960 he had changed his mind: the way to upend the art of his time was through sculpture-sculpture of a sort never seen before. The results are some of the most audacious and provocative art objects of the twentieth century.

Oldenburg conceived his efforts in two successive campaigns: first The Street, which he made and presented in 1960, and then The Store, of 1961. The Street was an immersive installation depicting the artist's gritty Lower East Side neighborhood. Its materials-scavenged cardboard, newspaper, and black poster paint-mirrored the scene it portrayed. Oldenburg's portrait conveyed not only the squalor of the neighborhood, but also the mysterious allure of its "bums" and "chicks," its signage, and even its manhole covers. Crudely rendered, as if by a child, Oldenburg's sculptures and drawings presented an abstracted version of reality, "a mixture of things as they are and things as they are imagined to be."

In 1961 Oldenburg shifted his gaze from the street to the store. During this intensely productive period, he created an array of brightly colored objects depicting comestibles, clothing, and other everyday items. He displayed his sculptures in a rented storefront on East Second Street that he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. The Store was open to the public Friday to Sunday, one o'clock to six o'clock; in the off-hours Oldenburg used the space as his studio. The handcrafted and painted art objects on sale were as unconventional as their setting: lumpy and unruly, they neither resembled the mass-produced items they purported to represent nor shared the recognizable look of fine art. "I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself," said Oldenburg, "that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."

Oldenburg's fascination with the stuff of everyday life is manifested in his passion for collecting nonprecious objects that attract his eye. In the 1970s he assembled a selection of hundreds of these items in a structure he entitled Mouse Museum, to which he soon added Ray Gun Wing. Together Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing present the artist's complex and sustained engagement with popular culture and its relationship to his work in all mediums.

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Claes Oldenburg came to New York City from his hometown of Chicago in 1956, when he was twenty-seven years old. Initially aiming to make his mark as a painter, by 1960 he had changed his mind: the way to upend the art of his time was through sculpture-sculpture of a sort never seen before.

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Find out more about the life and work of American artist Roy Lichtenstein, one of the most important figures of the Pop Art movement, at Biography.com.

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High-art demigod, consummate businessman or a blurring of the two? It's a continual debate when it comes to the life of artist Andy Warhol. Learn more at Biography.com.

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An acclaimed artist since the 1950s, Jasper Johns has produced paintings, prints and sculptures. His best-known art features ordinary items like flags and maps.

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Pop Art icon James Rosenquist exploded onto the scene in 1960 with his vivid, large-scale paintings. Trained as a painter of billboard signs, Rosenquist abstracted familiar imagery from advertising and pop culture through adjustments in scale and irrational juxtapositions that owe a debt to Surrealism.