Duchamp, Warhol, and the Roots of Pop Art

Introduction

Marcel Duchamp had a considerable influence on post-World War I art. Duchamp is typically associated with Dada and Surrealism. His work can be considered avant-garde, using seemingly ordinary objects and reinterpreting them for his audience. Duchamp can be considered a playboy of the art world, much preferring play over academics. Duchamp embraced the sublime, preferring the unusual to the ordinary. The following explores Duchamp's New York Dada period and places it in context with the works of Andy Warhol.

From Readymades to Soup Cans

Andy Warhol's work transforms ordinary objects into art that summarizes the industrialization that permeated his society. Perhaps the most poignant example was his painting of 50 soup cans. This symbolized the uniformity and confines of modern society. Each of the cans was an individual in its own right, but in mass, the individuality disappeared. Duchamp paved the way for the acceptance of Warhol's work by redefining what was considered art.¹

Duchamp's Readymades radically changed ideas about what art is and what art is not. Duchamp used ordinary, mass-produced objects placed in gallery spaces. One of the most controversial examples of this redefinition was his rendition of a urinal, which he creatively titled The Fountain.² Transforming ordinary objects into an art form exemplifies a key similarity between Warhol and Duchamp.

Warhol saw art in a more mass-produced, industrialized manner than Duchamp.³ Warhol's art production techniques were routine, often producing the same image repeatedly.⁴ Warhol defined Pop Art as the use of iconic images that anyone would recognize.⁵ However, the art of both Warhol and Duchamp does not represent mass public opinion; rather, it captures the absurdity of the everyday and the mundane. Duchamp took several everyday objects and combined them in unexpected ways. For instance, he mounted an ordinary bicycle wheel on top of an ordinary stool, and suspended a spool of string between two copper plates.

Warhol's ordinary objects were remarkable precisely because they were exactly what one would expect them to be. A soup can was a soup can, lined up just as it would be in any American kitchen cupboard. The absurdity of Warhol's work does not stem from an unusual use of the object — as with Duchamp's work — but rather from the normalcy of the object and its usage. From this perspective, Warhol's work is much more realistic. The surreal quality of Warhol's work arises only from its depiction as art. This idea may have been inspired by Duchamp's Readymades, such as the snow shovel or hat rack.

Warhol felt that images of Marilyn Monroe were so overproduced that the image no longer represented the person, but stood on its own as a mass-produced icon.⁶ Warhol saw a world full of commodities. Like Duchamp, his subject was the everyday rather than the extraordinary. The work of both artists embodies the essence of a manufactured society. Rather than minimizing the importance of objects, these artists asked their viewers to marvel at the complexity of the objects themselves — objects the viewer takes for granted every day, never considering them the true art form they represent.