Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans: Why Is It Art? | Art History

Postmodernism emerged as a response to modernism's failure to create a better world. Modernism's optimistic vision was shattered by World War II, leading to post-war restoration of old systems. The 1960s brought decolonization, consumer society, and mass media. Mass production created consumers obsessed with external symbols of success. Media began constructing hyperreality where representations replaced actual experience, creating simulations that increasingly substituted for reality itself.

This section traces the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. Modernism emerged after industrialization, creating new forms to help people live with their era. Postmodernism arose in the 1950s-60s as a response to disillusionment with grand ideologies, adopting irony as its primary tool. Key techniques include pastiche—borrowing and distorting historical elements to create discomfort rather than serenity. Examples include American Graffiti (filmed in the 1970s but set in the 1950s) and Star Wars, which synthesizes elements from kung fu films, Arthurian legends, and adventure genres into something new.

Postmodernism is an intellectual, cultural, and artistic movement that emerged in the mid-20th century as a response to the failures of modernism, particularly after World War II and the Holocaust revealed the limitations of modernism's utopian vision based on rationality, progress, and universal truth; postmodernism rejects grand narratives and instead emphasizes pluralism, fragmentation, deconstruction of established structures, subjective experience, and the power of language in shaping reality, while significantly influencing literature through fragmented narratives and pastiche, visual art through appropriation and irony, and architecture through complexity and historical reference.

Modernism was an early 20th-century art movement that defied traditional 19th-century ideas, encouraging artists to try new things and question everything. Examples include Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Joyce, and Proust. Postmodernism emerged mid-to-late 20th century as both an art and philosophical movement characterized by heavy cynicism and irony, emphasizing nihilism and subjective truth. It made parody and pastiche popular, with intertextuality being a key element where works reference other media.

Around 1968, Western society shifted from modernism (which emphasized education, following rules, and believing this would save the world) to postmodernism. This transition occurred because people recognized that excessive education, religion, law, and knowledge had contributed to catastrophic events like the two World Wars and the Holocaust. The result was a move toward living with disorder rather than asserting absolute truths.

The nature of mass imagery fascinated other artists in the 60s as well. If Warhol and Rauschenberg were into television, Roy Lichtenstein was about print. His best known source was American comic strips of the 40s and 50s—the stuff that artists of his generation who made the pop movement grew up on. To its detractors, it looked about as challenging as bubble gum. Take a comic and blow it up, but there was more to it than that. Lichtenstein was intrigued by the difference between scanning and looking—you scan a frame in a comic strip and then flick on because comics exist to tell a story, but a painting is meant to detain you. Another source for us in mass culture was the American billboard. James Rosenquist used to paint them for a living. My billboard painting experience: I painted oh hundreds of square feet of Franco-American spaghetti and I painted large beer glass 60 ft long and some bacon. The salesman would come along and they'd say that beer hasn't got enough hops in it, you have to make it a little bit lighter, or the bacon is dirty. There's a kind of Buckeye surrealism in big American advertisements with their weird meetings of image and their overlaps and sudden cut-offs and giant size. This went into Rosenquist's paintings. They had a casual narrative style but enormous scale—like 19th century history painting. Like billboards, they were about paradise, but a paradise of consumers, fatally compromised. Rosenquist summed up his ambition to be a painter of American history in the one major painting that the Vietnam War provoked: 'The F-111.' The title comes from a bomber the Americans were using against the Vietnamese. There's a sour irony from the contrast between that killing machine and those emblems of the good life—the life that so many Americans believed was being defended outside Saigon in 1965. In 1965, pop was big and brash—it had learned that from other media—but there was no chance it could survive outside the museum. On the street, real mass culture would have simply crushed it. This gap between art and life was not closed. No country in the world makes that clearer than America—the home of the most enlightened patronage and of the most profound indifference to the visual environment that our century has known. The city that put up the stiffest resistance to the idea of culture with a capital CA was Las Vegas. You can't imagine an art museum in a place like Las Vegas, and in fact here the idea of art simply evaporates because there's nothing to do—it flies off in the face of the illusions of which this place is composed. Sudden wealth, endless orgasm, Dean Martin—this is the Disney World of terminal greed. No wonder it had such an enormous appeal to the pop sensibility because here you have an infinite variety of signs which are all plugging exactly the same product. Luck, now the products are abstract and only the signs are real. So Vegas sums up American gigantism—not because it's big but because it pretends to be. There's no way that museum art can rival the commercial extravaganzas of the real world. The artists who worked with neon and lights in the 1960s certainly couldn't—their efforts were as pointless as building a souvenir that rivals the Eiffel Tower. The trouble is that in a showdown between painting and the big media, painting cannot possibly win. People believe what they see on the screen, in photos, or even on the box, but nobody extracts the essential information for the conduct of their lives from looking at paintings anymore. Compared to the media, painting is a small thing—it's just a vibration in a museum. It deals with what hasn't already been said, but it isn't even a very good religion. Once it gives up its claims to seriousness, it's shot. The pop sensibility and its ironies nearly took these claims away, dissolving them in the doctrine that the medium is the message. Then it became apparent that all this doctrine boiled down to was the idea that it doesn't matter what art says. Perhaps Andy Warhol was right for his moment when he said that pop art was about liking things, but even so, it's not enough. Man is an animal who judges, and even in a culture which is split as disastrously as many ways as ours has, the problems of choice and taste and moral responsibility for images still remain. In fact, they get harder. The rock upon which the avant-garde sank was that art could no longer control that responsibility. Claes Oldenburg was the thinking person's Walt Disney. Born in Sweden and raised in Chicago, he grew up fascinated by the size of things. His art was literally about appetite—the desire to touch, squash, stroke, absorb, digest, and become what he saw. He always tried to make the art look like it's part of the world around it, at the same time taking great pains to show that it doesn't function as part of the world around it. He took ordinary things, small ones, got huge; soft ones, hard; hard ones, soft. A ladder becomes a torso with breasts and nipples. A Chicago fire plug becomes a torso with breasts and nipples—a fire plug directly outside his house that he saw every day. The logic of use is gone, things take on multiple meanings and keep alluding back to the human body. He took an object and deprived it of its function completely, took an ordinary object, changed its scale and material, and suddenly it is a stranger to the world, weird and complicated. He had a condition he wanted to express about form, and then an object sort of fits into that condition. The best examples of this complication of an ordinary thing back into an image are his big ones—the monuments. Not many have actually been built, but in Philadelphia, this one was. What could be more ordinary than a clothespin? On the other hand, you'd have to go some way before you found anything more dreamlike and grotesque than a clothespin 40 ft high, like a monster in a movie. It suggests that the real world is somehow contrived to rise against its owners, but it's also partly human effect which underscores its monstrosity. The clothespin has two legs and one is encouraged therefore to read it as a man. The spring clip on the thing's torso suggests compression, force, inhibition. The angles are all sharp and there's nothing flabby, and the thing is in fact a giant authority figure, a sort of parody of the hero in sculpture—a modern Colossus of Roads. Oldenburg's range goes all the way from that to the pastoral. In his power of invention and his drive to impose his whole self on the world, fears and all, he is the nearest equivalent to Picasso that America has yet produced.

This section explores key Pop Art artists and their distinctive approaches. Roy Lichtenstein created large-scale paintings based on comic strip imagery, using primary colors and bold black outlines to reveal the banality of American popular culture. Andy Warhol's 'Marilyn Diptych' reproduced celebrity images with color variations, suggesting that like mass-produced objects, contemporary myths were manipulated for consumption. Claes Oldenburg created giant sculptures of everyday objects like hamburgers, transforming familiar items into monumental art. The lesson emphasizes that Pop Art's expressive resources were similar to mass media, including cinema, advertising, and television, making the art immediately recognizable to audiences.

American Pop Art developed independently from British Pop Art, shaped by unique American conditions including the rise of television and consumer culture. By the late 1950s, 90% of American households owned televisions, creating a receptive audience for Pop Art's themes. Key pioneers including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg incorporated comic strips, advertisements, and commercial imagery into their work. Lichtenstein's process involved selecting reference images, projecting them onto canvas, and applying the Ben-Day dot technique originally used in comic printing. His philosophy embraced industrialization, stating he drew to reconstruct rather than reproduce. These artists' backgrounds in commercial design enabled them to effectively translate everyday consumer imagery into fine art contexts, challenging the art establishment's dismissal of Pop Art as vulgar and banal.

American Pop Art developed distinct characteristics, particularly through Andy Warhol's innovative approach. His 1962 exhibition of Campbell's Soup Cans at Ferus Gallery challenged fine art conventions by presenting commercial food packaging as artistic subjects. Warhol initially painted these works by hand before adopting screen printing, a technique using fabric matrices that enabled mass production and distanced the artwork from the artist's direct hand. Roy Lichtenstein took a different path, continuing to paint by hand while incorporating comic book imagery and parodying Abstract Expressionist gestural painting in his Brushstrokes series. Claes Oldenburg further expanded Pop Art through large-scale sculptures in rubber and industrial materials depicting inflated food items, transforming mundane objects into monumental artworks that lost their original functional purpose.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) parodied commercial art through comic strip reproductions with Ben-Day dots and bold outlines, creating false reality with pessimistic and misogynistic elements. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), homeless and schizophrenic, was discovered by Warhol and collaborated on works like beef rib steaks. Marisol (1930-2016) critiqued gender roles through sculptures like 'Women and Dog,' mimicking femininity to challenge advertising's portrayal of women as commodities. Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) created oversized soft sculptures and protested the Vietnam War with 'Lipstick on a Tank' (1969)—using feminine cosmetics as phalluses on military tanks. Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) created interactive 'Tirs' paintings where audiences shot at balloons to complete the artwork, combining readymade concepts, action painting, and participatory audience involvement.

Neo-pop art emerged in the 1980s as the successor to 1960s pop art, characterized by the use of everyday objects and popular culture imagery, absence of formal manifestos, and the goal of provoking social, cultural, or political reactions; key artists include Keith Haring (known for accessible subway graffiti art), Jeff Koons (renowned for complex porcelain sculptures and colorful installations), Takashi Murakami (creator of Superflat and iconic characters like Mr. DOB), Wang Guangyi (who addressed China's political contradictions through ironic posters), and Romero Britto (who created colorful portraits for major brands and celebrities).

Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist who created a sculpture for a commercial featuring a cyborg-like creature with disturbing characteristics, described as becoming more repulsive the longer viewers look at it. Anabuki Corporation, a Japanese construction company, created a commercial featuring Little Red Riding Hood and various animals, showing animals becoming happy when the corporation deforests areas to build condominiums. These commercials demonstrate how advertising can incorporate art and controversial corporate messages.

Modern art has shifted from challenging viewers intellectually to providing visual entertainment, with artists like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, and Takashi Murakami creating works that prioritize commercial appeal, visual impact, and marketability over depth, meaning, and intellectual engagement, reflecting a broader societal trend toward cognitive comfort and superficiality.

Neo-Pop is an artistic movement from the 1980s that evolved from Pop Art by incorporating elements from comics, cartoons, mass media, and advertisements, characterized by ironic and parodic attitudes toward banal and popular culture, with artists like Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Takashi Murakami creating works that blend diverse materials and techniques. Urban art, also known as street art, encompasses graffiti, stencil art, and interventions in public spaces, featuring ephemeral and often controversial expressions that challenge societal norms, with graffiti originating as political communication and evolving into a cultural movement of identity and resistance.

Neo-pop art prioritizes visual appeal and marketability over conceptual depth. Artists like Takashi Murakami exemplify market-oriented approaches through extensive merchandise lines and commercial collaborations. While such works may be enjoyable and suitable for family museum visits, they lack substantive meaning that distinguishes significant contemporary art. In contemporary art markets, collector demand often supersedes artistic merit, with artist names becoming more important than individual works. This dynamic transforms art into a commodity where market value often supersedes artistic quality.