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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Photo of a pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein, depicting bold brush strokes.

With its depiction of large, dripping brushstrokes, Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Big Painting offers a wry commentary on the Abstract Expressionist paintings that dominated the New York art world in the 1940s and 1950s. Lichtenstein parodied his predecessors’ signature bold brushstrokes, rendering them flat and stylized, even mimicking the drips of paint that would have resulted from the artists’ sweeping, spontaneous gestures. While the Abstract Expressionists largely understood their work as standing in opposition to popular culture, Lichtenstein set his brushstrokes against a field of repeating Benday dots—a mechanical process for creating shades of color in commercial printing. Likewise, the thick black lines painted around bands of solid white, yellow, and red recall graphic devices used in comic strips. The result satirizes the supposedly improvisational and personal style of the previous generation’s “big paintings” and underscores the fact that they inevitably relied on mass media for their renown.

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America Is Hard to See

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ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997), LITTLE BIG PAINTING, 1965

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America Is Hard to See

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ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997), LITTLE BIG PAINTING, 1965

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection