In 1961, a Sears, Roebuck newspaper ad pictured several items for sale. One was a water heater for $55. It caught Andy Warhol’s fancy, so he painted it, in the same black-and-white scheme as the ad.
“Why in the world would that be the choice for Warhol?” asked Patricia Hickson, the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. “Why this stood out to him is a mystery to anyone.”
The new exhibit at the Atheneum, “Hand-Painted Pop! Art and Appropriation, 1961 to Now,” provides an enlightening overview of the way artists co-opted of imagery from popular culture, such as advertisements, movies, photojournalism and newsreels.
Hickson, the exhibit’s curator, said “Hand-Painted Pop!” is a “dossier show” that expands on themes in two key images: Warhol’s “Water Heater” and Roy Lichtenstein’s “Girl With Ball,” whose composition was borrowed from a 1960 ad for the Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos. “A dossier show is tightly focused, expanding on one’s understanding of a certain idea or theme,” she said.
The Warhol and Lichtenstein are on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Most of the rest of the 19 pieces are owned by the Atheneum.
The show focuses on early pop art, before mechanical reproduction of artwork became the norm. The Lichtenstein and Warhol, as well as works by Wayne Thiebaud, Rosalyn Drexler and Robert Arneson, were handmade. Pieces such as these, Hickson said, were a break from the nonrepresentational abstract expressionism.
“Most of these artists worked in the commercial art world, illustration, design, billboards,” she said. “These images were in the world and they were bombarded with them daily. Why can’t they become subjects for art?”
Still, the artworks were created with paint on canvas, like abstract expressionism but unlike mature pop. “Abstract expressionism was all about the brushstroke, the gesture, the artist’s inner world,” she said. “In the transitional period, these [pop art] works were clearly done by hand, even if they were emulating a water heater ad.”
Each artwork is exhibited next to imagery that inspired it: Warhol’s Sears ad, Lichtenstein’s resort ad, Arneson’s news reports on the 1956 car-crash death of Jackson Pollock.
Other Warhol source images a photograph of an electric chair that inspired “Triple Silver Disaster,” which he created in 1963, when he was transitioning from hand-painted to mechanically reproduced pop, and a publicity still from the 1953 Marilyn Monroe film noir “Niagara,” cropped tightly and used to create his iconic “Marilyn” prints.
Drexler’s “The Rescue,” a collage made of a blown-up street photograph by Weegee and then painted over, depicts a woman being hauled away on a stretcher. “The work has the look of pop with the bright colors, which offsets the difficult subject matter she’s mining,” Hickson said.
Arneson’s “Jackson’s Crash,” a three-part piece, used the news report and an ad for a 1950 Oldsmobile 88 convertible, the car Pollock was driving when he drunkenly veered off the road. A death mask of Pollock hovers over the piece, which could be seen as a commentary on the death of abstract expressionism.
Two pieces by Cady Noland were created from photojournalistic images from the dark side: two sweet-faced followers of Charles Manson, and Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. Dulce Chacon was inspired by the Hindenburg disaster to create a series of ink-on-paper drawings.
Hank Willis Thomas and Richard Prince used advertising images for their artworks. Thomas riffed on Nike ads to make a statement on exploitation of black men, and Prince directly lifted a Marlboro cigarette ad.
More Warhol
An exhibit up until June 23 at Westport Arts Center, 51 Riverside Ave., also focuses on the influence of advertising on pop art. “Main Street to Madison Avenue” focuses on Wesport residents who worked in advertising and artists who appropriated the aesthetic of advertising, including Warhol, Jonathan Horowitz and Walter Robinson.
“Spring into Summer with Andy Warhol and Friends,” to run June 10 to Aug. 20 at Bruce Museum, One Museum Drive in Greenwich, builds on three gifts to the Bruce. They are “Warhol’s Little Red Book,” a 1971 set of Polaroids that include a self-portrait and portraits of architect Philip Johnson, Johnson’s partner David Whitney, model Donna Jordan and art critic Barbara Rose; two 1977 silkscreen portraits of Sachiko Bower; and “Flowers,” a 1974 suite of 10 hand-colored silkscreened prints. These items will be enhanced by a loan of Warhol’s 1983 silkscreen series “Endangered Species,” including images of a tiger, a butterfly, a zebra, an orangutan, a rhinoceros, a ram, an elephant, a frog, a panda and an eagle.
“HAND-PAINTED POP! ART AND APPROPRIATION, 1961 TO NOW” is at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford, until Aug. 13. thewadsworth.org.
