America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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In the early 1960s, Pop art challenged the gestures of Abstract Expressionism with an unflinching embrace of America’s exploding commercial and media culture. The sources of this new art were generally neither the artist’s imagination nor direct observation of the world, but rather images themselves—whether product packaging, print advertisements, newspaper photography, or comic books. Early in their careers, many of Pop’s protagonists worked as commercial artists; Andy Warhol was an illustrator and James Rosenquist a Billboard painter, while Ed Ruscha trained in graphic design. These commercial backgrounds yielded flat, boldly graphic, mechanical-looking, and impersonal surfaces that were sometimes marked by photographic and printing processes.

The works on view in this chapter present a range of attitudes toward consumer culture. Some feel upbeat and celebratory, such as Tom Wesselmann’s enormous sandwich or Wayne Thiebaud’s luscious cakes. Other works, however, seem to distort or critique the American dream by hinting at overindulgent materialism or the social turmoil of the 1960s. Marisol’s fractured figures present themselves as mutant mannequins, and in Warhol’s hands, plastic surgery and an endless display of Coca-Cola bottles offer a false promise of beauty and sustenance, a vision of branding and self-improvement run amok. Despite its bright colors and visual wallop, Pop art’s tone was often deadpan and chilly, closer to its banal sources than to traditional fine art. Fittingly, it incited a media sensation and charges of vulgarity, but the aftershocks of its revolutionary take on American culture can still be felt today.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Vija Celmins is known for her painstakingly rendered photorealist paintings and drawings, which examine such subjects as desert and ocean surfaces and nocturnal skies. The still lifes she made in the early 1960s, however, are among the artist’s most restrained and introspective works. In a series executed in 1964, while still a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Celmins painted domestic objects from her Venice, California, studio—a lamp, a hotplate, a fan, a knife resting on a saucer—as an exercise in close looking. Situating these everyday things that relate to the basic necessities of heat, food, and light within fields of gray or brown, she created muted grounds that spurned the slick finishes and bright Pop colors favored by other Southern California artists at that time.

In Heater, a characteristic work from this series, a small space heater emits a contained orange glow while its electrical cord trails out of the picture plane, suggesting a larger space beyond the otherwise flattened composition. A tension between the illusion of warmth that radiates from luminous coils of Heater and its physical absence from the canvas adds to the painting’s unnerving impact. While the subject of this work seems innocuous, its somber, shadowy rendering suggests something more ominous. Indeed, such darker subtexts appear in other, more pointedly political and austere works from this period. Celmins had begun looking to mass media—a Timemagazine cover depicting the 1965 Watts uprising in Los Angeles, and images of fighter planes on her television—for source material that reflected the turbulence of the 1960s.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 90. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

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VIJA CELMINS (B. 1938), HEATER, 1964

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America Is Hard to See

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VIJA CELMINS (B. 1938), HEATER, 1964

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Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

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