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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Malcolm Bailey based this untitled painting on diagrams of a slave ship that had been published in 1780 by an English abolitionist group. The blue paint is reminiscent of blueprints, underscoring the careful engineering that was integral to the abduction and transportation of millions of Africans from their homelands. At the center of the image is a line drawing of a cotton plant, the basis of the economic system that fed on slave labor. For Bailey, this diagrammatic rendering makes its point more clearly than could simple naturalism. “An artist’s job,” he wrote, “should be more than one of just mirroring life; he must instead interpret life in a very subjective abstract way.”

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America Is Hard to See

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MALCOLM BAILEY (1947-2011), UNTITLED, 1969, 1969

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America Is Hard to See

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MALCOLM BAILEY (1947-2011), UNTITLED, 1969, 1969

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection