Tilman Osterwold

"Everything is beautiful," raved Andy Warhol, in raptures at the glamour of modern life, consumer society, and the world of the media and its stars; his proclamation can be considered the maxim of the pop generation, which included artists Jasper Joh ns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Richard Hamilton, among others. The pop artists of the 1960s had a profound effect on the cloth of art history and their influence can be clearly seen i n art today. Here, Tilman Osterwald explores the styles, themes, and sources of pop art around the world.

Soup cans and Whaam! The makers and shapers of Pop Art Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, and the role of the artist and artwork.Pop artists primary provocation was to defy ideas of the artistic canon or originality by integratingmass market imageryinto their works. Whetheradvertising slogans, famed Hollywood faces, comic strip style characters, or the packaging of consumer products, the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein knowingly reproduced mundane, everyday images from popular culture.At the same time, Pop Art reduced the role of the individual and challenged the notion of originality by deploying mass production techniques such as screen printing. Like a hall of mirrors, the resulting works came to interrogate both the ideas and desires of contemporary culture, and its state of simulacra, whereby images, substitutes, and representations come to define the experience of reality .In this book, Tilman Osterwold explores the styles, sources, and stars of the Pop Art phenomenon. From Lichtenstein s comic book aesthetics to Warhol s images of Marilyn, it explores how a movement that interrogated the icons of its time came to produce icons of its own. "