Art and AdvertisingAndy Warhol and the Pop Art

by Dario Lo Presti

Introduction Advertising is a form of art, or art itself is an advertising activity?

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Modern art and publicity are born together with the great social,

technological and distributive changes that have modified the

principles of art.

Industrial revolution, technical reproducibility, multiplication of

the products turned into commodity, diffusion of the information and

the building of the net of transports go together with the change of

artist’s figure, of the public, the work’s form and the statute of art.

F. Depero, Campa con Campari, 1928

T. Lautrec, Moulin Rouge: la Goulue, 1891

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The posters of Toulouse Lautrec

represented with strong and immediacy

the atmosphere of the time.

Depero takes from the publicity and

communication the same playful and

happy spirit that will be the essence of his

style.

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In the late 1950s and 1960s the conceptual art breaked the taboo of

the oneness and not reproducibility of art’s work, expressing the

idea that a photo, an object of design or the packaging of a product

could become a symbolic phenomenon and so art.

It will be really the Pop Art, above all with Andy Warhol, to

bring this process to the extreme consequences.

Pop art and society of the image

Pop art was an art

movement in the late 1950s

and 1960s that reflected

the growing materialism

and consumerism in society.

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Andy Warhol, Marilyn, 1967

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Close Cover Before Striking (Pepsi-Cola), 1962

Pop artists used popular images, that were developed through the industral production and the media, as their sources including:

• Advertising (Coca-Cola)

• Product packaging (Brillo boxes)

• Celebrities (E. Presley)

• Comic Strips (Girl with Ball, Roy

Lichtenstein)

• Photographs (Jackie Kennedy)

Andy Warhol

Warhol liked to produce art

work based around to a

something that was common

at the time. Campbell’s Soup

was very popular in USA

during the 1960s.

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“It perhaps is not the life a series of images, that change only in the way to be repeated?” Andy Warhol

Campbell’s Soup I, 1968

Five Coke Bottles,1962

Warhol used two essential techniques to give visibility to those images of consumption.

The first is the isolation and expansion of the image (as in portraits of

Marylin Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor).

The second, and more important, is the serial repetition of the subject that

loses its daily function separating itself from the real world.

Early Colored Liz, 19638

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Brillo boxes installation Stable gallery of New

York, 1964

Warhol had the genial idea taking objects of daily use and gave

them importance of “art”. He raised questions about the nature of

art:

What’s the true work of art?

Knives, ca. 1981- 82

From the publicity to the art

Conclusions

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With the Pop Art and Andy Warhol the art establishes a strong

relationship with the system of the mass-media, particularly with

the advertising, using the same depersonalizing and repetitive

languages.

Through his work, Warhol brings out prominence some values

of mass-communication:

1. The loss of contents

2. The “death” of the image

Bibliography

• Boatto Alberto, Warhol:Art dossier, Giunti, Firenze, 1995.

• Calvesi Maurizio and Boatto Alberto, Pop Art: Art dossier,

Giunti,Firenze, 1989.

• Grazioli Elio, Arte e Pubblicità, Mondadori, Milano, 2001.

• Trotta Mauro, La pubblicità, Ellissi, 2002.

• www.pittorifamosi.it

• www.paopao.it/index.php/esposizioni-collettive/132-sold-out

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