CULTURE, ART & LITERATURE Andy Warhol: the Pop Art Genius WARM-UP Cos è per te l arte? Sai proporre esempi di opere d arte? Se fossi un artista, cosa ti piacerebbe rappresentare? Discutine con la classe. SPEAKING 12 The Pop Art movement Pop Art was an artistic movement that emerged in America and Britain between the 1950 s and the 1960 s and it was an expression of society and a challenge to tradition. The term pop derived from popular and aimed to represent as high (art) what was low (commercial culture), by including advertisements , comic books, and everyday objects in the works of art, focusing on their banality. Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (born 1928, Pennsylvania) was a painter , a writer, a film-maker and the most important artist of Pop Art. In 1949 he moved to New York City to work as a commercial artist for magazines. He won prizes for his advertising and window displays but he wanted to do something new. In 1961, he had the idea of using popular commercial goods as art objects and he soon became the most outstanding painter of Pop Art, reproducing commercial images over and over . The first experiment was in 1962: a painting in which a can of tomato soup was represented thirtytwo times. Campbell s Soup Cans is now at the MoMa Museum in New York. Marilyn Diptych 34 Mao Paintings Famous Warhol paintings Mass culture was his source of inspiration, so Warhol also used pictures of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in his works. The style was the same: he repeated the same picture over and over, often changing colours and backgrounds. Marilyn Diptych (1962), his most famous work, was a tribute to Marilyn Monroe who died in that year and represents his two most important themes: death and the cult of celebrities. He painted another famous painting, Mao Paintings (1973), after the meeting between the American president Richard Nixon and the Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung. Over five series, Warhol produced 199 Mao paintings! In 1981 he produced a collection called Myths, combining popular culture with imagination and representing cartoons, superheroes and fictional characters. The most famous painting of this series is Mickey Mouse. His works are so exclusive that some of them were sold for 100 million dollars. Mickey Mouse