AN OVERVIEW TO MODERN ART: ANDY WARHOL AND KEITH
HARING
ANDY WARHOL
Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before
he began to make art destined for galleries. Nevertheless, his screen-printed images of Marilyn
Monroe, soup cans, and sensational newspaper stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop art.
He emerged from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, to
become a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York, and to ultimately find a place in the circles of
High Society. For many his ascent echoes one of Pop art's ambitions, to bring popular styles and
subjects into the exclusive salons of high art. His elevation to the status of a popular icon represented
a new kind of fame and celebrity for a fine artist.
Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)
By the 1960s, the New York art world was in a rut as Abstract Expressionism’s explosion of the 1940s
and '50s had grown stale. Warhol was one of the artists hungry to reintroduce imagery to his work.
The gallery owner and interior designer Muriel Latow presented Warhol with the idea of painting soup
cans, when she suggested to him that he should paint objects that people use every day. (It is
rumoured that Warhol ate the soup for lunch on a daily basis).
Because Warhol was already an extremely successful consumer ad designer, he used the techniques
of his trade to create an image that was both easily recognizable and visually stimulating. He was well
versed in the concepts of the advertising industry, which was currently invading the American psyche
with its promise of happiness through abundant consumerism. He mirrored this by painting soup cans
on thirty-two canvases aligned on a wall to denote the experience of being in a well-lit supermarket.
With this installation, Warhol became credited with envisioning a new type of art that glorified (and
also criticized) the nation’s impetus toward consumption.
Warhol would go on to say about his ethos of putting ordinary items front and center, "I just paint
things I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about."
KEITH HARING
Keith Haring joined a long but sporadic lineage of twentieth century artists who brought elements of
popular culture, "low art" and non-art elements into the formerly exclusive "high art" spaces of
museums and galleries. He drew on the techniques and locales of street-based art such as graffiti
and murals, employed bright and artificial colors, and kept imagery accessible in order to grab the
eyes and minds of viewers and get them both to enjoy themselves and to engage with important
concerns. Along with his artist contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, Haring
opened the field of possibility for how seemingly simple and even cartoony elements by self-taught or
less-schooled artists might be appreciated.
Untitled (1982)
One of his early works, this radiant heart-love motif would show up in many paintings and drawings
throughout the rest of his career. This innocent yet controversial image of two men in love is mild in
comparison with Haring's later sexually explicit images., but the boldness of representing homosexual
love at this point in time was already a significant statement and a marked achievement in the larger
cultural realm. As his art career unfolded, and his confidence grew, it gave him the courage to
generate more sexually explicit images of gay figures and scenes. In the above image, two people
are depicted in love, with Haring's often-used lines of energy emphasizing this euphoric state as
much as the kinetic movement of these figures' bodies in space. This image in many ways distills the
optimistic attitude of Haring, who was, at heart, in many ways a Romantic, believing in humanity and
the power of love.
Visually, the image is classic Haring in its flat, two-dimensional surface, cartoon-like simplicity and the
use of vibrant, saturated colors. He often outlined his characters and scenes with thick black lines
reminiscent of many earlier modern artists (such as Picasso), as well as from the Pop art movement
(Warhol), in addition to Haring's contemporaries the 1980s New York City graffiti artists. Haring used
vibrant lines in and around his subjects to convey energy, both positive and negative. Some attribute
his adoption of this visual sign to the influence of Hip Hop music, where the visual imagery of dark
lines was used to represent the impact of sound on listeners.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsY4ihZCJL8&list=PLozeIONfFzaBGKz-
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A Guide to Pop art
