Andy Warhol's Pop Art Movement

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In the late 1950s the appearance of the pop art movement took its style from popular culture such as comics, advertisements, movies, and television, but in Andy Warhol’s case he focused on celebrities. Warhol’s recognized use of celebrities as artistic subject matter had inspired pop artists to focus on important icons or figures. During this time pop art was heavily accompanied with the media, allowing these figures to be artistic sources and reflections of the current period. The use of identifiable figures in pop art questions whether people are being true to their character, or altering their actions in order to promote themselves from the public eye; the power of knowing they are under surveillance by the media. Elvis I and II –made in …show more content…

He believes that the process of painting multiple artworks repeatedly was hard. Instead, he chose the appreciation of mechanizing his works and using machineries to reproduce his artworks (Garrels 9). Throughout his career Warhol had developed many different artistic techniques to reproduce his artworks, but silk screening was known to be his best and most frequently used technique. This well known method involves the combination of photographic techniques and silkscreen printing. The silkscreen acts as a stencil where the woven material is stretched onto a wooden frame that is covered with a photosensitive emulsion. When Warhol wants to make a multi-colored print, more than one screen will be used for the separate colours (Garrels 88). The idea of silk screening to mass produce his prints more efficiently is claimed to be the start of Warhol’s artistic development. Today, there are many people who manipulate and use Warhol’s technique of silk printing for their own …show more content…

Silk screening is known for being able to efficiently create an abundance of prints, while also being cheap and requiring very little effort. Elvis I and II was based off from a photograph, which makes it even easier to replicate the artwork. Since Elvis I and II was intended to serve as publicity shots for Presley’s movie Flaming Star, the repetition of the same image between the vast amount of prints allowed for immediate attention by both men and women who idolized him. Film and television celebrities led the way, but artists, politicians, newscasters, business leaders, and athletes—indeed, people in every walk of life—grasped the importance of their ‘image’ (Drucker & McVarish270). Considering how Presley’s ‘image’ is being promoted by Warhol, his silk screening technique also emphasised how simple and easily replaceable these prints of Presley could be made; which is derogatory to Elvis’ image. Warhol takes this insult even further by sending an enormous roll of printed Presley images that—by Warhol’s instructions—to be cut by the museum in any way they like (McCarthy 355). Warhol’s lack of care and finesse for his images directly corresponds to a disregard for the outcome of how Presley will be presented. In this specific case, it’s not even that the prints could be easily replaced, but because he didn’t want to handle the task of stretching and hanging (McCarthy 356).

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