GM 2017

Grade 7 – Visual Arts Term 4

POP ART

Contents What is Pop Art? ....................................................................................................................... 2

Famous Pop Art Artworks ......................................................................................................... 2

Andy Warhol .......................................................................................................................... 2

Roy Lichtenstein .................................................................................................................... 4

Visual Literacy .......................................................................................................................... 6

2

GM 2017 GM 2017

What is Pop Art? Pop art is young, bold, colourful and fun. Pop

art (short for popular art) is a type of art that, in

the 1950s and 1960s, moved away from

traditional art such as landscapes and stiff

portraits to subjects that most people could

relate to. The subject matter of the art moved

away from traditional art themes like morality1

and history and, instead, celebrated common

place objects and people’s everyday lives. Another important difference between traditional

art and pop art was its mass production. In traditional art, great value was placed on

paintings and sculptures and they were usually one of a kind. A person usually had to be

very rich to afford art produced by a good artist. Pop art was mass produced – many copies

of one artistic work could be made at low cost. This meant that everybody could own and

enjoy art.

Famous Pop Art Artworks

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (6 August 1928 – 22 February 1987) was an important artist in the pop art

movement. He was famous for using brands like Coca Cola and Campbell's Soup (which was

one of his favourite things to eat) in his art.

1 Principles concerning the differences between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.

3

GM 2017 GM 2017

Warhol liked to use bright colours and silk screening techniques to mass-produce artworks

based on photographs of celebrities, like this famous image of Marilyn Monroe.

Screen printing is a printing process that can create lots of artwork that look the same. The

design is separated into individual colours and the position of each colour is marked out by a

stencil on a screen. The screen is a frame of wood with a fine mesh stretched over it. The

different coloured inks are pushed through each stencil one at a time and the colours build up

to form a picture.

Warhol saw art as a product, the same as the clothes you wear and the food you eat. He had

a very particular personal style. He had a shock of white hair and was usually seen wearing a

black, leather jacket and glasses or sunglasses.

4

GM 2017 GM 2017

Roy Lichtenstein Roy Lichtenstein’s art was all about cartoons, comics and big bangs!

Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1923. He became famous for his bright and bold

paintings of comic strip cartoons as well as his paintings of everyday objects. Lichtenstein

chose colours carefully, to imitate the four colours of newspaper printers’ inks. He also used

Ben Day dots, a system invented to increase the range of colours available to newspaper

printing. Look closely at his work – can you see how the colours are clear from a distance, but

look like tiny dots and dashes close-up?

5

GM 2017 GM 2017

Lichtenstein is famous for his use of cartoon strips from American comic books, which were

very popular the 1950s. He admired the skill of the comic book artist, who could create

complex stories of love and war in cartoon form.

He was sometimes accused of copying comics exactly, but he said that he made changes to

the pictures – right down to the tiniest placement of individual dots. Look at the two images

below. The first is an image from a comic book. The second is Lichtenstein’s artistic

interpretation of the image. Do you think his critics have a point?

Comic Cartoon Image

Lichtenstein’s art: BLAM

6

GM 2017 GM 2017

Visual Literacy

Look at the picture below and answer the questions that follow.

Questions:

1. Which famous musician is shown in this picture? (1)

2. Why do you think the artist repeated the image? (1)

3. Why do you think the artist used so many bright colours? (1)