Pop Art and High Culture: Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Kruger

From Abstract Expressionism to Popular Culture

The world of art has seen two distinct trends since the mid-twentieth century. On one hand, high art has become less central to most people's lives. More visceral forms of popular media — photography, film, and television — have claimed the public's attention. There is no longer a reliance on visual representations such as sketching and painting to commemorate historical and personal occasions. As a result of this divide between popular and high culture, and the increasing significance of pop culture, high art has begun to adopt many themes and even the visual style of popular works to justify its existence. As pop culture becomes part of every person's framework of reference, the elements of pop art have been co-opted and reconfigured by many major artists.

This cross-pollination between high and popular culture began when the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock — nicknamed "Jack the Dripper" — became famous as a result of a Life magazine article on his work. The Life "action" shots showing Pollock in the act of painting made a formerly obscure style of art — one that looked to the untrained eye like splatter painting — more meaningful and accessible. Life was a photojournalist magazine, but it had the power to make a traditional art form (painting) relevant in a popular fashion. "As the single most recognizable practitioner of Abstract Expressionism — the movement that put America and, specifically, post-World War II New York at the epicenter of painting's avant-garde — Pollock was a genuine art star" ("Jackson Pollock," Time). Pollock's star soon fell as he drifted into depression and substance abuse, but the Life magazine article set the tone for how art and the popular press would enter into dialogue in the twentieth century. High art could no longer afford to ignore popular art, given its ubiquity.

The Emergence of Pop Art

The next major movement in America after Pollock was Pop Art, a deliberate reaction to the obscurity of Abstract Expressionism. In contrast to the abstraction prevalent during the early twentieth century, Pop Art had a very literal appearance, drawing from the stylistic vocabulary of advertising, cartoons, and other popular media. It superficially looked "like something" in a simplistic and representational fashion, although it arguably critiqued and ironized what it portrayed despite its shallow surface. "It could be argued that the Abstract Expressionists searched for trauma in the soul, while Pop artists searched for traces of the same trauma in the mediated world of advertising, cartoons, and popular imagery at large" ("Pop Art," The Art Story). Pop Art collapsed the division between high and popular art to such a degree that it was often difficult to distinguish the two when the inspiration and the artwork were placed side by side. Andy Warhol's famous silk-screened Campbell's soup cans, for example, were deliberately designed to look somewhat rough and amateurish — much like an advertisement for the product — rather than presenting a more refined vision of the iconic red-and-white graphic.

There was also a difference in attitude as well as aesthetic. Pop Art overall had a more playful texture than Abstract Expressionism. Its representational rather than abstract style carried an observational, intellectually self-referential quality, in contrast to the sense that Abstract Expressionism was opening a window onto the artist's individual soul in a Romantic sense. "Although Pop art encompasses a wide variety of work with very different attitudes and postures, much of it is somewhat emotionally removed. In contrast to the 'hot' expression of the gestural abstraction that preceded it, Pop art is generally 'coolly' ambivalent. Whether this suggests an acceptance of the popular world or a shocked withdrawal has been the subject of much debate" ("Pop Art," The Art Story). There was little of the actual artist in the work. Much like Warhol's famous studies of Campbell's soup cans, the focus was on creating a dispassionate tone that drained the image of any potential higher meaning: the repetition of the cans and their sameness suggested there was no meaning, emotion, or individuality in the face of such branding of experience.

Roy Lichtenstein and the Language of Cartoons

An excellent example of the transposition of popular art into high art can be seen in the works of Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein employed a technique that deliberately gave his paintings the texture of pulpy, sensational popular magazines and cartoons of his era. "Lichtenstein's emphasis on methods of mechanical reproduction — particularly through his signature use of Ben-Day dots — highlighted one of the central lessons of Pop art, that all forms of communication, all messages, are filtered through codes or languages" ("Roy Lichtenstein," The Art Story). Lichtenstein maintained that he used cartoons ironically and wished to show "that high art and popular art were no different: both rely on code" ("Roy Lichtenstein," The Art Story). His understanding of code as a kind of specific vocabulary or shorthand was counter to the notion of art as something self-expressive and transcendent. He stated: "I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object — a kind of crystallized symbol of it" ("Roy Lichtenstein," The Art Story).

In fact, much of Lichtenstein's work can be understood as "twice removed" from its original source. In a portrait of a drowning woman, for example, he was inspired by an actual panel from a teen romance magazine, which he then translated into "art." The viewer feels no sense of loss or emotional connection to the woman, given that the source was already a sensationalistic reproduction further removed from reality by being taken out of context and placed on canvas as high art ("Roy Lichtenstein," The Art Story).

Another striking example of Lichtenstein's work is his famous Popeye (1961), a direct reproduction of a cartoon panel of the well-known spinach-eating strongman. By enlarging Popeye and placing the figure on canvas, Lichtenstein made an implicit argument for the potential artistic value of something as humble as a cartoon, while simultaneously exposing the emptiness of consumerist reproductions. "The essence of Lichtenstein's procedure lay in the enlargement and unification of his source material… Lichtenstein emphasized the banality and emptiness of his motifs as an equivalent to the impersonal, mechanized style of drawing" (Busche, "Roy Lichtenstein"). The creation of supposedly "high art," in other words, renders the original popular source more banal rather than more meaningful. The visual impact was purely aesthetic, not attributable to any deeper intrinsic meaning. Indeed, beyond parodying comic book art, many viewed Lichtenstein's works as also thumbing their noses at the art establishment and its demand for emotional significance and truth.

Conclusion: The Collapse of High and Popular Art

Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Kruger all highlight the degree to which conventional notions of what constitutes an appropriate tone and subject for art were collapsed in the twentieth century. Art was no longer confined to rarefied subject matters or museum walls. High art could appropriate popular culture — not simply popular subjects such as peasants or working men and women — and make that appropriation the very substance of its argument. Art was no longer about the soul of an original artist, as was typical of previous Romantic conceptions of the artist-to-output relationship. Rather, the artist came to function as a cultural commentator, someone more interested in interrogating the world of images and consumption than in pursuing self-expression.