Roy Lichtenstein Essay

He was most succesful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began making art destined for gallerys. Nevertheless,

Roy Lichtenstein’s art ‘investigates modes of representation - the visual properties of style and reproduction’. (Weitman 1999 p.46) Lichtenstein was fixated on advertisements and comic strips. These modes of

World War I was a war that shocked the world and brought about new emotions that created a large wave of “-isms” as well as the “lost generation” of writers. Modern art was catalyzed by World War I and without a thorough study of the various forms of art that resulted from it, modern art and the tremendous effect that World War I had on the people of the world cannot be fully understood. This historical investigation will cover a few aspects of the art that resulted from World War I so that a general idea of the emotions shared by the people of the world can be known. A few paintings that represent specific movements will be studied to understand the artistic movement. A number of museum exhibitions will be studied along with government websites, databases, and museum websites, especially from the Museum of Modern Art.

Jacob Lawrence was an African American painter, who was known for his portraits of the African American life. He was best known for his series titled, the Migration. Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 7th of 1917. After his parents separated, Lawrence and his younger siblings were put into the foster care system until his mother could support her children in New York. His education into the world of art was not only formal, but informal as well. It was formal because he learned from after-school community workshops at Utopia House and later at the Harlem Art Workshop. However, it was informal because he could observe the rhythms and activity of the streets of Harlem. Not only was he a painter but he was active as a teacher, in contrast Lawrence was active as both a painter and art educator. In 1946, he began teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and would go on to teach at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1971, Lawrence became a professor of painting at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Later on in his career, he was also known for his serigraphs (silkscreens), many of them versions of series of paintings completed in earlier years, as well as for his book illustrations. Lawrence was still drawing and painting in preparation for still another series of works when he died in Seattle in 2000.” (Capozzola)

He completed a Certificate in 1965 at Caulfield Institute of Technology then received Associate Diploma of Painting from the National Gallery School in Melbourne. Having received student residencies from New York, London and Barcelona enabled him to immerse himself in different cultures, landscapes and urban images which influenced his earlier work, now his current work is a reflection of his hometown of Melbourne.

His artwork has a happy feeling towards it, which I think was also influenced by the places he went especially Shanghai. Roys artwork that I have seen, usually has a girl in it with tears under her eyes, or sometimes she’s smiling. I don’t know if his life affected his artwork. That is my interpretation, I don’t see where his life affected his art. I can see he definitely put his life into his artwork though, if that makes any sense. I think that I would recognize their artwork if displayed somewhere. But, Roy’s artwork is comic-like and might not be noticeable. But I still think I would be able to notice it somewhere because it unique compared to other comics you see. Most comics have like superheroes, or Garfield. But he originated comics, and his are original.

James Rosenquist and Kehinde Wiley There are two American artists whose works are unique and contemporary: James Rosenquist, one of the frontiers of American pop art movement, and Kehinde Wiley, the artist who combines art history and heroic with black politic. The images that come into your mind when you think about Rosenquist’s work are collages. With his method of using sweet color, dislocated images, and billboard painting style, James Rosenquist has created his distinct and striking works. Kehinde Wiley, a Los Angeles artist, also has a remarkable style of painting.

Bas Jan Ader was born on April 19, 1942 to Dutch ministers. From the beginning, Ader’s life was somewhat unusual. When he was two years old, his father was executed by the Nazis for helping Jewish refugees. Later, Ader attended Rietveld Academy before failing and hitchhiking to Morocco when he was 19 (Biography). Once in Morocco, Ader became a deckhand on an America-destined yacht. However, the yacht shipwrecked near California, where Ader enrolled at the Otis Art Institute (Verwoert). Here, Ader met the school’s director’s daughter- Mary Sue Andersen, who he later married (Biography). Ader then began teaching art at Claremont Graduate School. Finally, it was in the 1960s when his artwork truly began to gather momentum (Verwoert).

Hailed as the founding father of the Pop Art movement in the late 1950's and early 1960's, Andy Warhol, through his endeavors, brought forward society's obsession with mass culture and allowed it to become the subject of his art. He produced works that defied and challenged the popular notion of what art should be by disputing the "traditional conventions pertaining to the uniqueness, authenticity, and authorship" of art (Faerna 28). However, it is an injustice to say that Warhol's goals primarily included the desire to create such a ground-breaking and salient style of American art or to entertain the public by making his own artistic contributions. Rather, Andy Warhol's interests were more entwined in his own self-interest and greed.

Sheldon Allan Silverstein was born in the frigid metroplex of Chicago, Illinois on September 25th, 1930. In 1950, when he was twenty years old, he enlisted in the United States Army, and served in Korea and Japan. After serving, he became a cartoonist for the “Stars And Stripes” magazine. Illustrating the magazine cause him to become more popular in the illustration field. He began drawing for magazines such as “Look And Sports,” but it wasn’t until he was illustrating for “Playboy” that he was a household name. Silverstein was fortunate enough to have his cartoons be in every issue of the magazine during its highpoint in popularity.

One of his jobs was to design the weather map for NBC’s morning news. In 1952 Warhol held his first exhibit, it was not a financial success, but it enhanced Warhol’s reputation as a commercial artist. But his spare time was now taken up with pop art, inspired by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, two young pop artist, Warhol had come across in 1958. He began to paint, draw and print everyday objects such as, dollar bills, soup cans, postage stamps, comic strips, and soda bottles. According to Warhol, these were some of the consumer products “on which America is built.”

Roy Liechtenstein, (fig 1) was born in 1923 into to a middle class Hungarian family living in New York, there was no artists on either side of his family and throughout Liechtenstein’s schooling there were no art

German composer and pianist, Ludwig van Beethoven, was born December 1770 and spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria. His first teacher was his alcoholic father, who worked as a musician at the Court of Bonn. Teaching him day and night, Ludwig suffered from his father's harsh and erratic behavior. For a time, he and his father played at the Church. As his father's alcoholism increased, Ludwig became the main musician.

The people back in the 19th century really didn’t accept Van Gaogh’s truthful and emotionally morbid way of expressing the way of art is to himself. It finally was seen as art through the people’s eyes. This set a stage of art that is now known as Expressionism. It is best characterized by the use of symbols and a style that expresses the artist’s inner feelings about his subject. His style of painting is exemplified by a projection of the painter’s inner experience onto the canvas he paints on. Van Gogh’s paintings are done with his feelings that goes on in his life. (Mark Harden’s Artchive)

Marc Chagall as an artist and as a person cannot be categorized. He was born in Vitebsk, Russia, learned to paint in St. Petersburg and lived in Paris, Berlin, and the United States. His career is influenced by many different factors. His Hasidic Jewish upbringing reflected in the content of his paintings greatly. The lyrical fairy tales of Jewish mysticism, the stories of the Bible, and the Rabbis and scholars who surrounded him in his childhood come out onto his work. When he went to art school in St. Petersburg it was the period when he became exposed to the avant-garde movement in art.