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"If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed."

Synopsis

David Hockney's bright swimming pools, split-level homes and suburban Californian landscapes are a strange brew of calm and hyperactivity. Shadows appear to have been banished from his acrylic canvases of the 1960s, slick as magazine pages. Flat planes exist side-by-side in a patchwork, muddling our sense of distance. Hockney's unmistakable style incorporates a broad range of sources from Baroque to Cubism and, most recently, computer graphics. An iconoclast obsessed with the Old Masters, this British Pop artist breaks every rule deliberately, delighting in the deconstruction of proportion, linear perspective, and color theory. He shows that orthodoxies are meant to be shattered, and that opposites can coexist, a message of tolerance that transcends art and has profound implications in the political and social realm.

Key Ideas

Like other Pop artists, Hockney revived figurative painting in a style that referenced the visual language of advertising. What separates him from others in the Pop movement is his obsession with Cubism. In the spirit of the Cubists, Hockney combines several scenes to create a composite view, choosing tricky spaces, like split-level homes in California and the Grand Canyon, where depth perception is already a challenge.

Hockney insists on personal subject matter - another thing that separates him from most other Pop artists. He depicts the domestic sphere - scenes from his own life and that of friends. This aligns him with Alice Neel, Alex Katz, and others who depicted their immediate surroundings in a manner that transcends a particular category or movement.

Hockney was openly gay, and has remained a staunch advocate for gay rights. In the context of a macho art scene that dismissed "pretty color" as effeminate, Hockney's bright greens, purples, pinks, and yellows are declarative statements in support of sexual freedom.

In actively seeking to imitate photographic effects in his work, Hockney is a forerunner of the Photorealists. He is also a heretic among purists who feel that painting should rely only on the artist's direct observations from nature. Though not universally accepted, Hockney's research into the history of art has shown that Old Masters, from Vermeer to Canaletto, frequently used the camera obscura (an early form of camera) to enhance their optical effects. If the revered Old Masters could use cameras, he implies, why can't we?

Most Important Art

A Bigger Splash (1967)

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David Hockney Artworks in Focus:

David Hockney Overview Continues Below

Biography

Childhood

One of five children, David Hockney was born into a working-class family in Yorkshire, northern England, in the industrial city of Bradford. His father, a conscientious objector during the Second World War, "had a kind heart" remembers Hockney. "He thought there should be justice in the world". He also romanticized the ideals of the Communist party in Russia. While adopting his father's anti-war stance, Hockney remained resistant to ideologies and hierarchies. As a schoolboy, Hockney says of himself, "I was always quite serious, but cheeky." Art was something he knew he wanted to do very early in life. At his school academically promising boys were forced to drop art as a subject and so he deliberately failed his exams.

Early Training

At 16, Hockney was admitted to the acclaimed Bradford School of Art, where he studied traditional painting and life drawing alongside Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby, and John Loker. Unlike most of his peers Hockney was working class, and he worked tirelessly, especially in his life drawing classes, recalling: "I was there from nine in the morning till nine at night."

In 1957 he was called up for National Service, but as a conscientious objector he served out his time as a hospital orderly. It was around this time that Hockney encountered the work of Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, whose openness about his sexual identity gave Hockney the courage to reveal his own.

In 1959, Hockney went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London and was taught by several well-known artists, including Roger de Grey and Ceri Richards. His friends included R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, and Peter Blake. At the time, the college asked students to submit an essay along with their final work. Hockney refused, wanting to be judged solely on the basis of his art. Remarkably, the RCA, a bastion of tradition, changed its rules to allow him to graduate.

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Mature Period

Hockney's first solo show, held in 1963 at John Kasmin's gallery, proved very successful. The following year he traveled to Los Angeles for the first time, where he met leading intellectual and artistic figures including Christopher Isherwood, and designer Ossie Clarke, with whom he struck up a close friendship and later traveled to the Grand Canyon. He would later be best man at Clarke's wedding to Celia Birtwell, of whom he would paint and draw many portraits. Over the following few years, he resided almost permanently in California, teaching at various universities including Berkeley and UCLA, but also traveling extensively around the US and Europe. During this period he painted some of his best-known works, including A Bigger Splash (1967). He also began to design productions for the ballet, opera, and theater.

In California during the 'swinging 60s', Hockney embraced the mood of experimentation, exploration, and iconoclasm. At a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the U.S. and Britain, Hockney's open love affairs and unapologetic attitude attracted the attention of newspapers and magazines. He met and started a long-term relationship with Peter Schlesinger, who also frequently acted as his model, a relationship that lasted from 1966 to 1971. Of his unconventional lifestyle and experimentation with drugs during this period, Hockney has commented: "you can't have a smoke-free bohemia. You can't have a drug-free bohemia. You can't have a drink-free bohemia." In 1973, Hockney moved to Paris, where he lived until 1975. By the mid-1970s, he was famous. 1974 saw a large traveling retrospective of his work, and a film about him directed by Jack Hazan. In 1976 Hockney published his autobiography and in 1978, he settled in Los Angeles, which became his permanent home.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s changed the art world forever, and had a particularly profound impact on Hockney who recalls "the first person to die of AIDS that I knew was in 1983, and then for ten years it was lots of people. If all those people were still here, I think it would be a different place." A retrospective of Hockney's work was due to take place at London's Tate gallery in 1988. He threatened to cancel it in protest of anti-homosexual legislation being proposed in Britain at the time.

Late Period

The 1990s constituted a very productive period for Hockney, with a huge number of retrospectives and exhibitions around the world. In 1991, he began a relationship with John Fitzherbert, a former chef, which lasted for the next 25 years. One of his most important large-scale works, A Closer Grand Canyon, was completed in 1998. From 2000-01 he researched and wrote a book about the Old Masters, developing a theory that these artists made use of the camera far earlier than previously thought. For his research, Hockney assembled photocopies of Old Master paintings, from Byzantine art to Van Gogh, on a huge wall in his LA studio. While Hockney's theory met with significant resistance, it has gained widespread support from the art history community. In 2002, Hockney moved to the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. In the same year, he sat for 120 hours for a portrait painted by Lucian Freud. In return, Freud sat for four hours for him.

Hockney had a stroke in 2012, which for a while impaired his speech. Much to his relief, "the stroke didn't affect my drawing, and that's the most important thing." Only a few months later, one of his assistants, Dominic Elliot, died in Hockney's home. He had taken cocaine and ecstasy and drunk a bottle of drain cleaner. Elliot had been in a relationship with Hockney's former partner John Fitzherbert, who was still living with him. At the high-profile inquest, Hockney was required to give evidence that the death was not a murder.

Legacy

In 2011 a poll of British art students rated Hockney as the most influential artist of all time. His work has played a crucial role in reviving the practice of figurative painting. Chuck Close, Cecily Brown, and film director Martin Scorsese (especially the aesthetics of Taxi Driver (1976)) are among the artists inspired by Hockney. Hockney, still prolific, continues to reinvent himself, embracing contemporary technology. His most recent series of works was produced on an iPad. Despite his widespread fame, he remains an iconoclast, steadfastly refusing to accept institutional authority, even some of the highest honors, turning down an invitation to paint a portrait of the Queen (Hockney was "very busy" and couldn't make it), and the Order of Merit, (a knighthood.) "I don't have strong feelings about the honours system" Hockney has remarked, "I don't value prizes of any sort. I value my friends."

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David Hockney Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works

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"If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed." David Hockney's bright swimming pools, split-level homes and suburban Californian landscapes are a strange brew of calm and hyperactivity.

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"In all my work there is some degree of content that is more obvious, communicating a specific or a general idea that people will get. But a lot of times the work is ambiguous enough that it can interpreted by whoever."

Synopsis

Keith Haring joined a long but sporadic lineage of twentieth century artists who brought elements of popular culture, "low art" and non-art elements into the formerly exclusive "high art" spaces of museums and galleries. He drew on the techniques and locales of street-based art such as graffiti and murals, employed bright and artificial colors, and kept imagery accessible in order to grab the eyes and minds of viewers and get them both to enjoy themselves and to engage with important concerns. Along with his artist contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, Haring opened the field of possibility for how seemingly simple and even cartoony elements by self-taught or less-schooled artists might be appreciated.

Key Ideas

Haring's deceptively simple imagery and text provided poignant and cutting cultural commentary on issues including AIDS, drug addiction, illicit love, and apartheid. As both an artist and an activist he established that depicting serious issues could be fun or at least lively when communicated through highly cartoony images and fresh and vivid choices of colors.

Haring's commitment to clean lines and simple images gave new life to figuration in painting, in contrast to the more abstract and conceptual approaches of the previous generation, and the more expressionistic gestural painting of his contemporaries.

Haring provided proof of the possibilities of using public sites that were not usually dedicated to art to share artistic and political messages to multiple audiences. He lent street art credibility and legitimacy and took it into fine art galleries and museums, inspiring a new generation of street-to-gallery artists.

Most Important Art

Keith Haring Artworks in Focus:

Biography

Childhood

Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, but grew up in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He discovered a love for drawing at an early age, learning basic cartooning skills from his father who drew comics for a hobby. Like many children of his generation he was an admirer of the popular animation of Disney, Dr. Seuss and Looney Toons.

Early Training

After High School In 1976, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh. After only two semesters, he realized that he had no interest in becoming a commercial graphic artist and dropped out. He remained temporarily in Pittsburgh and continued to study and work on his own. His critical influences at this time were a 1977 Pierre Alechinsky retrospective and a lecture by the sculptor Christo. In 1978 Haring had the good fortune to be invited for his first solo exhibition at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center when the Center's first choice artist cancelled. This gave him the confidence for the next big move in his fledgling art career - relocating to New York City.

Haring attended The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City in 1978. He soon discovered an alternative art scene happening in the streets and subways led by graffiti artists. He became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He first started doing his own white chalk drawings in the subways on the readily available plain black empty background of advertising spaces.

In his own words: "One day, riding the subway, I saw this empty black panel where an advertisement was supposed to go. I immediately realized that this was the perfect place to draw. I went back above ground to a card shop and bought a box of white chalk, went back down and did a drawing on it. It was perfect-soft black paper; chalk drew on it really easily."

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These drawings about life, love, sex and death became conversation starters for New York's subway riders. As Haring told it: "I was always totally amazed that the people I would meet while I was doing them were really, really concerned with what they meant. The first thing anyone asked me, no matter how old, no matter who they were, was what does it mean?" He credited the immediate and continuing feedback of these encounters with helping him channel his stylistic choices. Between 1980 and 1985, he produced thousands of public drawings, developing his style of cartoon-like characters and symbols while also developing name recognition. Eventually, along with other artists, musicians and poets, he organized exhibitions at clubs, restaurants, and even in illegally appropriated buildings or "squats," which were common in the New York City of the early 1980s. Two spaces in particular - The Mudd Club and Club 57 - became "go-to" hot spots for aspiring, young, creative individuals.

At the age of only 20, Haring already had strong opinions about the art world, as shown in the following quote from his journal: "Art in 1978 has seen numerous attempts at classifying or labeling and then exploiting an idea until the idea itself is lost in the process." Later in the same journal entry he stated the idealist notion that "Art is life and life is art".

Mature Period

Between 1978 to 1982 Haring established himself as a respected "rebel" artist of the street and alternative indoor spaces, outside the elite New York art world. Eventually, he accepted representation from Tony Shafrazi and in 1982 made his high visibility fine art debut with a popular and highly acclaimed one-man exhibition at Shafrazi's Soho gallery. Over the next few years he participated in notable international exhibitions such as Documenta 7 in Kassel, the Sao Paulo Biennial, and the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Throughout the 1980s he produced dozens of murals and public works all over the world, including in Europe, South America, and Australia. Through his travels, he saw the art of ancient cultures up-close, such as the Maya of Central America, Bahia-Brazil's peoples of mixed African and native descent, and the Aboriginal people of Australia, all of which had a lasting influence on his artwork. He also created a mural for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, on which he worked with 900 children. The following year he created a mural for Necker Children's Hospital in Paris, France, and a mural on the western side of the Berlin Wall (three years before it fell.) He also made lucrative commercial deals developing watch designs for Swatch and an advertising campaign for Absolut Vodka. He even painted bodies, including celebrities such as the iconic 1980's musician and performing artist Grace Jones. Much of his art was now politically charged such as the campaign to raise awareness about AIDS and South African Apartheid.

It was during this period that he developed a friendship with the famous Pop artist Andy Warhol. As with Basquiat, this relationship added to Haring's prestige and to the gradual, grudging acceptance of his work by the elite fine art establishment. American museum curators were still unsure about Haring's place in the canon of contemporary artists. This slow acknowledgement was similar to an earlier era when forward-looking European museums had acquired some of what became the most significant American modern artists of the 1950s and 1960s before the more conservative American museums accepted them into their prestigious institutions. To this day the biggest American museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago have only acquired a couple of Haring's lesser drawings, and other museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art have none at all.

In 1986 Haring opened Pop Shop, his own art merchandise store in downtown Manhattan. He decorated the interior and his many black and white style doodles filled every corner of the retail space. The merchandise was meant to be popular and affordable, and T-shirts, toys, posters, buttons and magnets bore his images. Pop Shop opened the door for later experiments and crossovers to mass-scale or low-cost retail items from the hands or minds of celebrated "fine" artists such as Murakami, Koons, and even Banksy.

In a sad, ironic twist of fate, at the peak of his career Haring, who, throughout the 1980s had used his artwork to advocate for AIDS awareness, was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding and images to AIDS organizations, and allocate resources towards finding a cure for the devastating disease. He was prolific in creating artwork right up to his death but died in 1990 of AIDS-related complications at only 31 years old.

Legacy

Many understand the overall ethos of street art as a rebellion against the status quo. For Haring this included the elitist fine art world itself. Though technically untrained rural folk art had found a niche, urban street art was only widely recognized after the 1980s commercial success of Haring and others such as Basquiat. Haring's success lent credibility and legitimacy to street art by proving it worthy of exhibition in fine art galleries and museums. As one very powerful example, Haring's didactic, subversive and cartoon-like art opened up the path for underground cartoonist Matt Groening's extremely successful Simpsons franchise (which included the longest running television show in American history, among other media that Groening's characters and images appeared in), a satire on the modern nuclear family and American values.

In the early 21st century on the streets, murals and urban graffiti art are now a worldwide phenomenon, with periodicals and websites dedicated to them as art forms. Successful street artists from the early 1980s paved the way for future street-to-gallery artists such as Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and Swoon. These artists were and are still considered rebels, at times risking arrest and/or censorship to display their often politically charged art in both public and private spaces. By choosing this contrarian path they have in many cases ultimately been able to negotiate better terms for the exhibition and compensation of their work within the usually more closed, elitist circles of the fine art world.

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Keith Haring Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works

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"In all my work there is some degree of content that is more obvious, communicating a specific or a general idea that people will get. But a lot of times the work is ambiguous enough that it can interpreted by whoever."

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David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. An important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.   Hockney was born in Bradford, Engla...

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Synopsis

Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his screenprinted images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and sensational newspaper stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop art. He emerged from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, to become a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York, and to ultimately find a place in the circles of High Society. For many his ascent echoes one of Pop art's ambitions, to bring popular styles and subjects into the exclusive salons of high art. His crowning achievement was the elevation of his own persona to the level of a popular icon, representing a new kind of fame and celebrity for a fine artist.

Key Ideas

Warhol's early commercial illustration has recently been acclaimed as the arena in which he first learned to manipulate popular tastes. His drawings were often comic, decorative, and whimsical, and their tone is entirely different from the cold and impersonal mood of his Pop art.

Much debate still surrounds the iconic screenprinted images with which Warhol established his reputation as a Pop artist in the early 1960s. Some view his Death and Disaster series, and his Marilyn pictures, as frank expressions of his sorrow at public events. Others view them as some of the first expressions of 'compassion fatigue' - the way the public loses the ability to sympathize with events from which they feel removed. Still others think of his pictures as screens - placed between us and horrifying events - which attempt to register and process shock.

Although artists had drawn on popular culture throughout the 20 th century, Pop art marked an important new stage in the breakdown between high and low art forms. Warhol's paintings from the early 1960s were important in pioneering these developments, but it is arguable that the diverse activities of his later years were just as influential in expanding the implications of Pop art into other spheres, and further eroding the borders between the worlds of high art and popular culture.

Although Warhol would continue to create paintings intermittently throughout his career, in 1965 he "retired" from the medium to concentrate on making experimental films. Despite years of neglect, these films have recently attracted widespread interest, and Warhol is now seen as one of the most important filmmakers of the period, a forefather of independent film.

Critics have traditionally seen Warhol's career as going into decline in 1968, after he was shot by Valerie Solanas. Valuing his early paintings above all, they have ignored the activities that absorbed his attention in later years - parties, collecting, publishing, and painting commissioned portraits. Yet some have begun to think that all these ventures make up Warhol's most important legacy because they prefigure the diverse interests, activities, and interventions that occupy artists today.

Biography

Childhood

Andy was the third child born to Czechoslovakian immigrant parents, Ondrej and Ulja (Julia) Warhola, in a working class neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He had two older brothers, John and Paul. As a child, Andy was smart and creative. His mother, a casual artist herself, encouraged his artistic urges by giving him his first camera at nine years old. Warhol was known to suffer from a nervous disorder that would frequently keep him at home, and, during these long periods, he would listen to the radio and collect pictures of movie stars around his bed. It was this exposure to current events at a young age that he later said shaped his obsession with pop culture and celebrities. When he was 14, his father passed away, leaving the family money to be specifically used towards higher learning for one of the boys. It was decided by the family that Andy would benefit the most from a college education.

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Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his screenprinted images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans, and sensational newspaper stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop art.

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"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum."

Synopsis

With his saggy hamburgers, colossal clothespins and giant three-way plugs, Claes Oldenburg has been the reigning king of Pop sculpture since the early 1960s, back when New York was still truly gritty. In 1961 he rented a storefront, called it The Store, and stocked it with stuffed, crudely-painted forms resembling diner food, cheap clothing, and other mass-manufactured items that stupefied an audience accustomed to the austere, non-representational forms in Abstract Expressionist sculpture. These so-called "soft-sculptures" are now hailed as the first sculptural expressions in Pop art. While his work has continued to grow in scale and ambition, his focus has remained steadfast: everyday items are presented on a magnified scale that reverses the traditional relationship between viewer and object. Oldenburg shrinks the spectator into a bite-sized morsel that might be devoured along with a giant piece of cake, or crushed by an enormous ice pack. His work shows us just how small we are, and serves as a vehicle for his smart, witty, critical, and often wickedly funny insights on American culture over the past half-century.

Key Ideas

Whereas Pop artists had imitated the flat language of billboards, magazines, television, etc., working in two-dimensional mediums, Oldenburg's three-dimensional papier maches, plaster models, and soft fabric forms brought Pop art into the realm of sculpture, a key innovation at the time.

Oldenburg's objects, no matter how apparently insignificant in themselves, become expressive entities, almost like characters in a stage play. This is partly due to their dramatically outsized scale and partly due to the soft forms he chooses, like fabric or latex. This distances Oldenburg from the cool detachment of Warhol or Lichtenstein, and makes his sculptures, almost like portraits, highlight the absurdity of American culture with a gentler cynicism than his Pop art peers.

The notion of enlarging a diminutive, everyday object and placing it in a landscape - an idea integral to Oldenburg's monumental public art - comes to us from the Surrealists such as Magritte, Dalí, and Ernst). In this respect, Oldenburg is the most Surreal of the Pop artists and his sculptures are like Surrealist dreams made real.

Oldenburg's unconventionally squishy, rearrangable sculpture challenged the hard, vertical orientation that persisted through Abstract Expressionism. His was a true breakthrough in the history of sculpture.

No matter how ordinary his subjects may seem to be, for Oldenburg, a clothespin is never just a clothespin. The process of fine tuning and adjustment, typical of his approach to large-scale commissions, reflects an unwavering interest in the impact of form that aligns him with earlier masters in the tradition of sculpture, from Michelangelo to Brancusi.

Most Important Art

Claes Oldenburg Artworks in Focus:

Biography

Childhood and Education

The son of a diplomat, Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1929 and settled with his family in Chicago in 1936. He and his younger brother, Richard, were educated at Yale and Harvard, respectively. Richard would later become the Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for over two decades (1972-1995). After graduating from Yale in 1950, where he studied literature and art history as well as studio art, Oldenburg took a job with the City News Bureau of Chicago and also intermittently attended the Art Institute of Chicago.

Early Training

In 1953, Oldenburg became a naturalized citizen and moved to New York, committed to pursuing a career in art. According to the artist, the "most creative and stimulating" influence was the environment of the Lower East Side, where The Beats, Fluxus, and Pop art groups converged on performance and gallery spaces at Judson Memorial Church off Washington Square. Here, he got to know regulars such as Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Jim Dine. Most everyone in this circle agreed that Abstract Expressionism was dead, but no one knew what came next, and daring experiments in multi-media and performance art abounded, overlapping in generations, sensibilities and approaches. Another vivid resource for Oldenburg's imagination was the library at Cooper Union, where he worked for several years and held his first one person exhibition in 1959, consisting of figurative drawings. It was there that he discovered the imaginary architecture envisioned by the eighteenth-century Romantics, and the construction and installation of the Statue of Liberty, sources that inspired his own whimsical drawings for monuments, and later public sculpture.

Mature Period

1960 was a breakthrough year for Oldenburg. The Yale graduate appeared (sans pants), covered in garbage, with Patty Mucha (whom he later married) in his piece Snapshots from the City, inspired by the neighborhood and staged at Judson Memorial Church. Inspired by the smorgasbord of sights and sounds in life and art in Lower Manhattan, he collaborated with Mucha on other performances, and produced his first soft sculptures. Traces of the rough-hewn, graffiti-like collages of Rauschenberg and anti-artisanal Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet can be seen in Oldenburg's ripped, scribbled cardboard figures, objects, and signs from that year. They were an explicit, down and dirty take based on his own observations of the neighborhood, and were displayed in his Lower East Side storefront studio The Street. Several works from this show sold. His follow-up studio exhibition, The Store, inspired by the bodegas and immigrant businesses in the generally run-down and marginalized immediate area, was even more commercially successful. Also in 1960 (preceding Warhol's "Factory" by two years) Oldenburg began calling his studio the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company and produced bulbous, crudely-fashioned "ray guns," imitations of generic sci-fi weapons for display in his rented storefront. He also collected toys and kitsch objects that he displayed alongside these sculptures in installations.

The Store caught the attention of the high-profile Green Gallery on 57th Street, where Oldenburg displayed his three colossal sculptures Floor Cake, Floor Cone, and Floor Burger, sculptures in stuffed, painted and sewn canvas, in 1962. From then on his work received significant acclaim, and for the next few years his production of "soft" convenience foods and domestic objects was prolific and varied: sandwiches, fries spilling out of the to-go packet, a hot water bottle, telephones and toilets, and other kitchen utensils and mass-manufactured household items. Characterized by a fluid hand, his works on paper remained an important, ongoing aspect of his career. Over the second half of the 1960s, he began to produce an extensive series of drawings of fantasy architecture, which led to prints and later, public monuments. Also during the late 60s, he established a long-term affiliation with pre-eminent art dealer Leo Castelli, who supported his ambition to produce work on a monumental scale.

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In an effort to realize some of his larger projects, in 1967 Oldenburg participated in an "art and technology" program run by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that led to a residency at a branch of Walt Disney Enterprises. This facilitated his development of a cartoon mouse, a symbol first explored in his early drawings, into which he incorporated the shape of a movie camera. This became Oldenburg's personal symbol and inspired the painted steel mouse sculptures of varied sizes and colors included in his "Mouse Museum" exhibition for Documenta (the international contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany) in 1972. A few years later, he created a similar museum-style installation of his stylized "ray guns."

In 1976, another breakthrough year, he executed his first monumental outdoor sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, and his first corporate commission, Clothespin (1976, Center Square Plaza, Philadelphia) shortly followed. From then on, he has focused nearly exclusively on large-scale public sculpture.

Late Period

Oldenburg married Dutch art historian, Coosje van Bruggen (1942-2009) in 1977, and collaborated with her on his colossal, polychrome outdoor sculptures from late 1976 until her death in 2009. Van Bruggen dealt with site logistics and solutions to logistical problems related to Oldenburg's sketches, freeing him to focus primarily on the designs for these public monuments, although these divisions were never clear-cut and Van Bruggen also contributed to creative ideas for the works. In this respect, their working relationship has been compared to that of the personal and professional duo Christo and Jean-Claude. Among their most popular projects are Spoonbridge and Cherry, (1988) a functional walking bridge over a stream in the form of a teaspoon holding a cherry (Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker Art Center), Shuttlecocks, (1994) which seem to have landed from a titan-sized badminton game (Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City), and Dropped Cone, (2001) a giant vanilla ice cream cone that collides with the corner of the roof of a shopping mall (Neumarkt Square, Cologne). Oldenburg's most recent completed public work is Paint Torch, (2011, Philadelphia). Still New York City-based, he now also works in California and France.

Legacy

Oldenburg's influences splinter off in numerous directions, touching an array of artists and movements that seem unrelated, in accordance with the subtlety and multi-valent meaning of his work. Oldenburg is as cynical as he is celebratory (who else would draw up a plan to replace the Washington Monument with a pair of castrating scissors?). Comfort food, his life-long obsession, is perhaps the ultimate symbol for inconsolable loneliness. First-generation feminists noticed this, and Niki de Saint-Phalle and Lynda Benglis were among the first sculptors drawn to his pliant, expressive forms which they emulated to some extent in their early work. In addition, as Donald Judd acknowledged in his seminal article "Specific Objects" (1965), in mimicking the process of food preparation ( Floor Cake, for example, is stuffed with ice cream cartons, troweled with icing-like paint, and assembled in layers), Oldenburg anticipated the credo of Minimalism: "it is what it is."

One needn't understand the multi-layered references to art or art history to enjoy Oldenburg's work. Its bright color, oversized scale, and unabashed appeal to the viewer influenced a generation of subsequent contemporary sculptors focused on manipulating the scale, placement, and texture of everyday objects, among them Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. The missing link between Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, Oldenburg broke new ground in his embrace of consumer appetites, giving audiences what they wanted, to literally: "let them eat cake."

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Claes Oldenburg Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works

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"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum." With his saggy hamburgers, colossal clothespins and giant three-way plugs, Claes Oldenburg has been the reigning king of Pop sculpture since the early 1960s, back when New York was still truly gritty.

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Oldenburg, at age 86, draws constantly, doodling even when in conversation. He'd become fascinated with the idea of public monuments as a child and began to design colossal sculptures for famous public gathering places that he never dreamed would be executed. But when life met art in 1969, the first large-scale monument- Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks- was actually fabricated as part of the protest against the Vietnam War that had spread to the campus of Yale University, Oldenburg's alma mater. Students saw the commissioned drawings he was making of a tanklike sculpture and paid to have it fabricated, placing it in front of a campus war memorial in a dramatic confrontation with the authorities. The action proved that his ideas could be realized as public sculptures, and Oldenburg began to receive commissions from cities and museums.

The soft sculptures were sewn by Oldenburg's first wife, an impish artist and poet named Patty Mucha, whom he met at art school. They separated in the early '70s, and Oldenburg met the beautiful and brilliant Dutch art historian Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married in 1977. Before van Bruggen's tragic early death in 2009, they traveled all over the world and collaborated in creating gigantic public sculpture that required advanced technology and great diplomatic skill in navigating political and financial obstacles. Recently friends have been trying to get him to finally realize his project for a giant teddy bear for Central Park, one of his original 1965 Proposed Colossal Monuments. Now as he puts his life and work in order, Oldenburg, in his large SoHo loft, is cleaning up his studio, salvaging writings, drawings, and sculptural maquettes he's produced throughout his career, some of which he is showing at Paula Cooper Gallery in an aptly named show, "Things Around the House." As we speak, Oldenburg glances over at the metal maquette of the teddy bear on a shelf, which, if it were ever realized, would change New York forever.

BARBARA ROSE: Claes, when did you decide to become an artist?

CLAES OLDENBURG: I was always interested in drawing. As a child, I started my own country, which was called Neubern. It was located in the South Atlantic. I did the documentation of Neubern in great detail. I drew everything that was there, all the houses and all the cars and all the people. We even had a navy and an air force. I spent a lot of time drawing.

ROSE: What was your position in Neubern?

OLDENBURG: I was the spirit of Neubern. I was the one drawing it. Nobody there knew about me. I was just the creator.

ROSE: A bit like God the Father?

OLDENBURG: Drawing started like that for me. I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer. I studied English and did a lot of reading.

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Oldenburg, at age 86, draws constantly, doodling even when in conversation. He'd become fascinated with the idea of public monuments as a child and began to design colossal sculptures for famous public gathering places that he never dreamed would be executed.

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From the archives: Keith Haring was here

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Keith Haring - 662 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Keith Haring. Bridging the gap between the art world and the street, Keith Haring rose to prominen...

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Official Works by David Hockney including exhibitions, resources and contact information.

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David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. An important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.   Hockney was born in Bradford, Engla...

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"I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it."

Synopsis

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the first American Pop artists to achieve widespread renown, and he became a lightning rod for criticism of the movement. His early work ranged widely in style and subject matter, and displayed considerable understanding of modernist painting: Lichtenstein would often maintain that he was as interested in the abstract qualities of his images as he was in their subject matter. However, the mature Pop style he arrived at in 1961, which was inspired by comic strips, was greeted by accusations of banality, lack of originality, and, later, even copying. His high-impact, iconic images have since become synonymous with Pop art, and his method of creating images, which blended aspects of mechanical reproduction and drawing by hand, has become central to critics' understanding of the significance of the movement.

Key Ideas

Art had carried references to popular culture throughout the 20 th century, but in Lichtenstein's works the styles, subject matter, and techniques of reproduction common in popular culture appeared to dominate the art entirely. This marked a major shift away from Abstract Expressionism, whose often tragic themes were thought to well up from the souls of the artists; Lichtenstein's inspirations came from the culture at large and suggested little of the artist's individual feelings.

Although, in the early 1960s, Lichtenstein was often casually accused of merely copying his pictures from cartoons, his method involved some considerable alteration of the source images. The extent of those changes, and the artist's rationale for introducing them, has long been central to discussions of his work, as it would seem to indicate whether he was interested above all in producing pleasing, artistic compositions, or in shocking his viewers with the garish impact of popular culture.

Lichtenstein's emphasis on methods of mechanical reproduction - particularly through his signature use of Ben-Day dots - highlighted one of the central lessons of Pop art, that all forms of communication, all messages, are filtered through codes or languages. Arguably, he learned his appreciation of the value of codes from his early work, which drew on an eclectic range of modern painting. This appreciation may also have later encouraged him to make work inspired by masterpieces of modern art; in these works he argued that high art and popular art were no different: both rely on code.

Most Important Art

Roy Lichtenstein Artworks in Focus:

Biography

Childhood

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born in New York City in a family with a German-Jewish background. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his father Milton, a real-estate broker, his mother Beatrice, a homemaker, and his younger sister Renee. As a child, Lichtenstein spent time listening to science fiction radio programs, visiting the American Museum of Natural History, building model airplanes, and drawing. As a teenager he nurtured his artistic interests by taking watercolor classes at Parsons School of Design, and in high school he started a jazz band.

Early Training

In 1940, Lichtenstein began taking Reginald Marsh's painting classes at the Art Students League, producing work very similar to Marsh's social realist style. Later that year, Lichtenstein enrolled at Ohio State University (OSU), where he studied drawing and design along with botany, history, and literature. He created sculptural animal figures, as well as portraits and still life works influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. At OSU, Lichtenstein also took a class with Hoyt Leon Sherman, whose theories about the connection between vision and perception, or "organized perception," became important concepts for Lichtenstein as his work evolved.

In 1943, Lichtenstein was drafted into the Army. As part of his tour of duty, he took engineering courses at De Paul University in Chicago. He also served as a clerk and draftsman, enlarging army newspaper cartoons for his commanding officer. He then traveled with the Army to England, France, Belgium, and Germany. After receiving an honorable discharge in 1946, the artist returned to OSU to complete his Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts. The next year he joined the graduate program at the University and served as an art instructor. His art at this time was inspired by aspects of Abstract Expressionism and biomorphic Surrealism.

In the next several years his work was included in gallery shows, such as a group exhibition at the Ten-Thirty Gallery in Cleveland, where he met his future wife Isabel Wilson, the gallery assistant at Ten-Thirty. By this stage, his paintings featured musicians, street workers, and racecar drivers rendered in biomorphic shapes and in a style that recalled the Surrealist work of Paul Klee. Over the next several years, Lichtenstein's paintings featured birds and insects in this same Surrealist style, as well as medieval motifs, particularly imagery of knights and dragons. In addition to strictly two-dimensional paintings, Lichtenstein began nurturing what would become a long-standing interest in using multiple media; in his first solo show in New York, at Carlebach Gallery (1951), he exhibited three-dimensional assemblages of kings and horses made of wood, metal, and found objects.

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Roy Lichtenstein Biography Continues

Mature Period

After moving to Cleveland with Isabel, Lichtenstein took on a number of commercial engineering and drafting jobs. His work at this time focused on cowboy and Native American motifs; more significantly, he created a rotating easel to be able to easily paint from all angles. The method of working (the rotation of the canvas) was more compelling to Lichtenstein: "I paint my own pictures upside down or sideways. I often don't even remember what most of them are about... The subjects aren't what hold my interest." In 1952, John Heller Gallery in New York began representing his work. Lichtenstein took an assistant professor position at SUNY Oswego in 1957, where his thickly textured paint and abstracted imagery drew from the Abstract Expressionist style. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists, however, he began to incorporate figures into his canvases; some of his paintings featured characters such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse hidden among the other depicted forms. Lichtenstein continued to teach, moving on to Rutgers's Douglass College in 1960 as an assistant professor, where he met Allan Kaprow. Kaprow introduced Lichtenstein to Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Robert Watts, George Segal, Robert Whitman and others who were integral members of the "happenings" art scene of the 1950s and 60s. The group produced unique performative art pieces that differed each time depending on audience involvement, but Lichtenstein was inspired by their interest in cartoon imagery.

In 1961, Lichtenstein created Look Mickey, his first cartoon work using Ben-Day dots, a commercial printing style for comic books or illustrations where small, closely spaced, colored dots are combined to create contrasting colors. He later exaggerated these dots in his paintings, a technique that came to define his style. The technique he developed at this time blended aspects of hand-drawing and mechanical reproduction; by 1963 he had settled on a procedure by which he first reproduced the chosen panel from a cartoon by hand, then projected the drawing using an opaque projector, traced it onto a canvas, then filled in the image with bold colors and stenciled Ben-Day dots.

In 1961, gallery owner Leo Castelli began representing Lichtenstein's work, giving him a solo exhibition in 1962 that substantially elevated the artist's renown and revenue. His fame did not come without controversy; his compositions outraged some viewers, and prompted LIFE Magazine to call him "one of the worst artists in America," albeit in a tongue-and-cheek fashion. Nevertheless, Lichtenstein soon began to show his work in major national exhibitions. In the 1960s, he continued using the Ben-Day dot technique in images of women and WWII combat scenes, as in Drowning Girl (1963), mostly adapted from issues of DC Comics. These cartoon-inspired paintings established Lichtenstein as an extremely prominent and immediately recognizable Pop art figure, both revered and reviled for his challenges to traditional understandings of "fine art."

By the mid 1960s, Lichtenstein began creating large-scale murals, his first of which was produced in 1964 for the World's Fair in Flushing, Queens. Moving beyond figural depictions, Lichtenstein also broadened his use of Ben-Day dots and bold, solid colors to depict landscapes, as in Yellow Landscape(1965). Such works often integrated industrial materials such as Plexiglas, metal, and a shimmery plastic called Rowlux, reflecting the artist's continued interest in using media beyond simply paint and canvas. Lichtenstein also began to create ceramic sculptures and, most iconically, produced a series of paintings of giant, cartoon-like brushstrokes covering the canvas, images which seemed to mock the Abstract Expressionists' use of the brushstroke as a signature and tool of individual expression. The second half of the 1960s also marked Lichtenstein's separation from his wife Isabel, and, a few years later, his marriage to Dorothy Herzka.

Lichtenstein began producing prints in 1962, using the offset lithograph technique that was more often used in commercial printing, and he began a long-term collaboration with the printmaking studio Gemini G.E.L. in 1969. In the 1970s, he left New York City for Southampton, where, inspired by Modern masters, he created still lifes and works with diverse textures and materials. Sculpture became an important focus during this time, particularly the use of bronze, which he used to produce large, painted sculptures of everyday objects such as lamps, pitchers, and steaming coffee cups. Lichtenstein also created a series of paintings involving mirrors, inspired by the historical use of mirror imagery in paintings to create a space beyond the canvas, as well as by the abstract designs used to symbolize mirrors in graphic art.

Late Period

By 1980, Lichtenstein was drawing from a wide variety of influences in his work, taking inspiration from Surrealism, Cubism, and German Expressionism, and using many different types of media. He re-established a studio in Manhattan and became more interested in Abstract Expressionism, as well as in Geometric Abstraction. He created a series of home interiors in the 1990s, basing his designs on ads in the Yellow Pages. Additionally, he continued to produce large paintings and sculptures for public spaces. In 1995, he received the National Medal of Arts. After his death in 1997, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was established in 1999.

Legacy

Roy Lichtenstein played a critical role in subverting the skeptical view of commercial styles and subjects established by the Abstract Expressionists. By embracing "low" art such as comic books and popular illustration, Lichtenstein became one of the most important figures in the Pop art movement. While his paintings of cartoons and comics are his most recognizable work, he had a prolific and somewhat eclectic career that drew from Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. But it is his re-imagining of popular culture through the lens of traditional art history that has remained a considerable influence to later generations of artists, as Pop art went on to significantly inform Postmodernism.

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Roy Lichtenstein Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works

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"I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it." Roy Lichtenstein was one of the first American Pop artists to achieve widespread renown, and he became a lightning rod for criticism of the movement.

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Roy Lichtenstein - 757 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Roy Lichtenstein. When American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey in 1961, it set th...

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Roy Fox Lichtenstein (; October 27, 1923 - September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.

Whaam! and Drowning Girl are generally regarded as Lichtenstein's most famous works, with Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... arguably third. Drowning Girl, Whaam! and Look Mickey are regarded as his most influential works. His most expensive piece is Masterpiece, which was sold for $165 million in January 2017.

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Roy Fox Lichtenstein (; October 27, 1923 - September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody.

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Who is Andy Warhol? Find out art facts about the pop art artist Andy Warhol in this art homework guide, includes facts for kids.